First hiccups seen in US push to deliver Covid-19 vaccine

Washington

THE first hiccups in the distribution of a Covid-19 vaccine in the United States included a holdup in delivering 3,900 shots to two states and the announcement that Pfizer Inc would deliver about 900,000 fewer doses next week than are set to ship this week.

Four delivery trays of the Pfizer-BioNTech SE vaccine were pulled back from delivery to California and Alabama this week and sent back to the company because they were colder than anticipated, according to Gustave Perna, the army general who serves as Operation Warp Speed's chief operations officer.

Each of the trays can likely be used to vaccinate 975 people. Pfizer has said its formula needs to be stored at 70 degrees below zero Celsius. These trays were found to be much colder, according to Mr Perna. "We were taking no chances," he said during a Wednesday news briefing.

Pfizer and federal health agencies are working to determine whether the formula can still be used when it reaches such low temperatures, according to Mr Perna.

Pfizer deploys the doses in temperature-controlled shipping containers that its own engineers developed. The containers are each equipped with GPS trackers "for continuous, real-time location and temperature monitoring", according to the firm, which has an around-the-clock control tower monitoring every shipment.

Meanwhile, US officials said at the briefing that about two million doses of the Pfizer vaccine will be allocated for the country next week, fewer than the 2.9 million available this week when the first shots shipped. They offered no explanation as to why.

Alex Azar, the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, acknowledged production challenges that have been previously disclosed by Pfizer. "As you know, they ended up coming short by half of what they thought they'd be able to produce and what they'd announced they'd be able to produce" in 2020, Mr Azar added.

Pfizer's vaccine was the first to win emergency authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration and immunisations began this week. Operation Warp Speed has said it expects to have enough vaccines between Pfizer and another shot on deck from Moderna Inc to inoculate 20 million Americans in December.

Operation Warp Speed has contracted for 100 million doses of Pfizer's vaccine, which requires two shots per patient. Mr Azar and other officials pushed back on recent reports that the US government declined to purchase more doses from Pfizer, saying the company couldn't guarantee they'd be ready by mid-2021.

On Tuesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that shipments of hundreds of thousands of doses hadn't yet been delivered to the state due to "a production issue with Pfizer".

Responding to Mr DeSantis's comments, Pfizer spokeswoman Amy Rose said the company "has not had any production issues with our Covid-19 vaccine, and no shipments containing the vaccine are on hold or delayed. We are continuing to dispatch our orders to the locations specified by the US government." BLOOMBERG