Charlie Baker is looking to send the National Guard to pick up Massachusetts’s vaccine shipment amid winter storm
"We may have some real issues with supply delivery this week."
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Gov. Charlie Baker says he’s hoping to utilize the Massachusetts National Guard to ensure that next week’s COVID-19 vaccine shipment from the federal government isn’t delayed by the coming winter storm.
“We may have some real issues with supply delivery this week,” Baker said during a speech Thursday to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.
Due to the storm hitting much of the East Coast this week, Baker said his administration was told Wednesday night that the state’s shipments “would be a few days late.” However, according to the the governor, Massachusetts and other states are looking “to take this one into our own hands” and send National Guard soldiers to the vaccine shipping hubs in Memphis and Louisville to bring back the shipments themselves, pending federal approval.
“What we just need to do is make sure that the federal government is going to let the National Guard do this for us,” Baker said. “We can’t afford to go what will be almost a week without getting any new doses from the feds and continue to maintain the appointment schedule as the people here expect and anticipate we’ll be able to maintain.”
As the Washington Post reported Wednesday night, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is projecting “widespread delays in COVID-19 vaccine shipments and deliveries over the next few days.” States from Arizona to Pennsylvania have had to cancel appointments as a result.
At least one vaccination site in Massachusetts, a clinic for veterans in Plymouth, postponed its opening until next Saturday, Feb, 27, citing shipping delays.
Forecasters expect light snow and sleet to begin accumulating by Thursday evening across most of Massachusetts, though the storm has already left millions without power across a number of other states, most notably Texas.
Baker first deployed the state’s National Guard to assist in vaccination efforts last week.
His remarks Thursday came amid intensifying criticism of the state’s vaccine appointment website, which crashed in the morning due to “extremely high volume” as residents between the ages of 65 and 74 and those with certain medical conditions that put them at high risk for COVID-19 became newly eligible to sign up for their first dose.
Officials have cautioned that it may take up to a month for the new groups to secure an appointment due to the limited number of doses. After receiving around 110,000 doses a week, officials said Wednesday that the state expected to get 139,000 doses for the coming week, which Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders characterized as a “very modest increase.”
At the current rate, Baker said Thursday that it “will take a very long time” to vaccine the targeted number of 4.1 million Massachusetts adults.
“I mean you folks can all do the math,” he said.
According to data released Thursday by the state’s Department of Public Health, 937,273 people have received their first dose of the two-shot Pfizer or Moderna vaccines (according to Baker, the second dose is shipped automatically thereafter, so officials focus on the size of first dose shipments). If shipments continued at the current rate of 139,000 doses a week, it would take until late July before the state had received — much less administered — the number of doses needed to give 4.1 million residents their first shot.
For that reason, Baker said many governors are “really anxious” for the outcome of the Food and Drug Administration’s review of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine next week.
“Not only does it bring a third vaccine into the mix, it’s a one-dose instead of a two-dose, and it’s J&J, which is a very big company that we all assume will be able to generate significant manufacturing and distribution capability in a pretty short period of time,” he said.
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