SC hospitals will only get 20-25% of COVID-19 vaccine doses wanted for 1st shots next week
South Carolina health officials say that hospitals in the state will only receive 20% to 25% of the COVID-19 vaccine doses they had requested for first shots next week, according to a Friday email from the S.C. Hospital Association’s president.
Thornton Kirby, president and CEO of the association, in an email just before 3 p.m. told hospitals the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control had advised him Friday morning that medical centers will receive “significantly less vaccine” than they wanted next week.
“The state expects to receive the same amount of Pfizer vaccine next week that we have been getting, but hospital requests this week totaled four times that amount,” Kirby wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette.
Hospitals will still get 100% of the doses they had requested for second shots, he added.
Both the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the Moderna vaccine use recommended two-dose regimens.
South Carolina has been receiving about 63,000 doses per week, according to Dr. Brannon Traxler, DHEC’s interim director of public health. Traxler on Friday told reporters that 100% of COVID-19 vaccines currently available in the state have been used or are earmarked for use.
The issue that Kirby described Friday likely stems from comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex M. Azar on Tuesday.
The Washington Post on Friday reported that while Azar had said the federal government would start to release all second doses held in a stockpile to speed up the nation’s distribution, there was actually no reserve.
The government had already been sending available doses to states, according to The Washington Post.
Some states had anticipated an influx of doses because of Azar’s announcement, The Post reported. It appears that South Carolina was no exception.
Hospitals will now have to scramble to handle the confusing situation after thousands of S.C. seniors signed up for vaccination appointments this week.
DHEC and the Governor’s Office on Monday announced that people 70 or older in the state could start to register for inoculations Wednesday.
Not including third-party providers, more than 162,900 appointments to get Pfizer doses had been scheduled statewide as of Friday, according to DHEC data.
“Many hospitals are likely to cancel first dose appointments next week,” Kirby wrote. “I’ve been told that VAMS (the Vaccine Administration Management System) doesn’t allow rescheduling; all canceled appointments will have to be scheduled anew. That means anyone whose appointment is canceled next week will be bumped to the end of the queue. That is unfortunate and likely to cause significant frustration.”
VAMS is a federal system where people register for their appointments. An invitation is needed to access VAMS, so hospitals have been asking people to provide health care facilities with their email addresses before then uploading those emails into VAMS, eventually generating a link for people to access the system.
The association’s president on Friday added he was concerned that hospitals “will be very reluctant” to schedule appointments beyond next week due to the unpredictable supply.
“DHEC has said they will try to get us accurate forecasts; that will be essential for future weeks,” he wrote.
Traxler, of DHEC, during a 1 p.m. briefing with reporters told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette that the state was still working to get information on The Post’s report to verify it and figure out what impact it might have on South Carolina.
She also said that the state was expecting the same allocation next week as it received this week.
“Some hospitals and vaccine providers who place orders for their weekly vaccine allocations have requested four to five times more doses than they had in previous weeks, to accommodate a high demand for the vaccine,” spokeswoman Laura Renwick wrote in a statement late Friday. “However, the state can’t fulfill the providers’ request for increased vaccine allocations because there is not enough vaccine available from the federal government.”
This story was originally published January 15, 2021 at 6:02 PM with the headline "SC hospitals will only get 20-25% of COVID-19 vaccine doses wanted for 1st shots next week."
