Weather slows delivery of WA vaccine shipments, but pharmacy program will expand next week
Washington state health officials delivered some bad news and some good news regarding COVID-19 vaccines Thursday.
The bad news: Inclement weather on the East Coast has delayed shipment of vaccine deliveries to the state.
“We estimate that more than 90 percent of this week’s allocation will arrive late because of the weather out east,” said Acting Assistant Secretary of Health Michele Roberts at a Thursday briefing. “Moderna vaccines have not yet shipped because of the weather. And Pfizer vaccines are limited right now.
“These delays have forced us to close our Benton-Franklin mass vaccination site through the weekend. People with appointments will be contacted by email to reschedule their appointments for next week.
“We hope deliveries will happen later this week. But we’re in a holding pattern until the weather on the East Coast lightens up, and vaccines can ship.”
On a happier note, a federal pharmacy program is sending more vaccines to the state starting next week, according to Roberts, who’s leading COVID-19 vaccine planning and distribution at the state Department of Health.
“We can add more pharmacies to the mix that are getting vaccine directly from the federal government,” she said Thursday. “Starting next week, Walmart, Rite Aid and Kroger, which is Fred Meyer and QFC here in Washington, will join Safeway and Albertsons, Costco and Health Mart independent pharmacies getting their vaccine directly from the federal pharmacy program.”
The doses are in addition to the state’s allocation, she noted.
“This week, our pharmacies received about 22,000 doses through this program alone,” Roberts said. “And although we don’t have numbers for next week yet for this program, we’re anticipating a big boost.”
Safeway/Albertsons, Haggen, Costco and Health Mart were in the first wave of the program’s rollout.
While the state’s three-week supply forecast is increasing, it is falling short of what’s being requested, Roberts said.
The state is prioritizing second-dose appointments at mass-vaccination sites and limiting first-dose appointments to ensure completion of the two-dose vaccine regimen.
“This week, our providers requested more than 440,000 total doses, but we’re only receiving a little more than 200,000 total doses from the federal government in our state allocation,” she said. “Looking ahead, our providers requested more than 430,000 total doses of vaccine next week, and we’ll be getting about 260,000 doses from the federal government.”
As of Feb. 15, more than 1.2 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been given out in Washington, according to the state, with more than 26,000 people vaccinated on average every day.
In Pierce County, about 10 percent of the population has been vaccinated so far, according to Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department officials.
As to when the state will move to start vaccinating the next tier, that answer is still to be determined.
“We still have work to do over the next couple of weeks to make sure everybody who is eligible has access to the vaccine or has an appointment. So we’re focusing on that right now before we determine when will we be moving,” State Secretary of Health Dr. Umair Shah told reporters Thursday.
The addition of the Johnson & Johnson one-dose vaccine, up for FDA consideration for emergency use authorization next week, could be a game-changer in the state’s distribution efforts.
“We really are hopeful that they’re going to give some guidance and situational guidance on what kinds of situations this vaccine would be effective in or helpful in or be best suited for,” said Shah.
It also could be targeted for specific groups facing more threats from COVID variants or were harder to reach in two-step vaccine programs, health officials said.
“The trials were done in a part of the world where there was a lot of variants, mainly the South African variant, and the performance that we’ve heard publicly was very reasonable,” said Dr. Scott Lindquist, state epidemiologist for Communicable Diseases with DOH.
“We’re being very aggressive about looking at how common these variants are in Washington state,” Lindquist said. “So that’s going to be really helpful information. And ... the use of this one-dose vaccine is so ideal for certain populations like migrant farm workers or ag workers or the maritime industry, fishing industry ... or even as as straightforward as prison systems where it’s hard to get access to people for these vaccines. So the bottom line is, we can’t wait to have more vaccine in the state, but this vaccine gives us additional promises.”
Health officials have cautioned that vaccine data is nuanced, and some communities have already expressed skepticism about the vaccine and the manufacturer itself based on feedback from DOH’s own outreach, according to Paj Nandi, director of community relations and equity with the state DOH.
He emphasized the department would need to focus on transparency in its vaccine distribution decisions if/when the third vaccine becomes available.
“Even though it is a one dose vaccine right now, the data is still showing that it is less efficacious, which again, it’s very nuanced,” he noted, “because we know that, that it is still highly efficacious in preventing hospitalizations and deaths.
“There are just a lot of things to balance. And we want to make sure that we’re providing rapid information to communities, so they’re well informed about this vaccine. And then they have some sense into our transparent process of how we actually make that decision.”
Disease activity
Shah told reporters at Thursday’s briefing that statewide, “Our daily case counts are still fairly high. But overall trends, as you know, are moving in the right direction.”
The entire state now is in Phase 2 of the state’s Roadmap to Recovery reopening plan.
Similar news was presented locally at Wednesday’s Board of Health meeting
Nigel Turner, director of the communicable disease division of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, said that while Pierce and its region were now meeting all four requirements in the Roadmap plan, up from three previously, disease activity remains “10 times what we were seeing in the spring.”
“In terms of overall cases, we still see widespread transmission. But we’re also seeing testing impacted, we have seen a drop in the number of tests in the county from, a high of about 3,000, to about 1,900.”
Positivity and hospitalization rates also declined, he noted, but warned that everyone needed to stay vigilant with masking and hygiene and social distancing measures.
“We still have vaccine levels that are not going to be highly protective overall to the population level,” he reminded the board, as the county still struggles with a tight vaccine supply.
Lindquist, though, was optimistic in his outlook he delivered at Thursday’s briefing.
“What we have been doing is working,” he noted. “it looks really, really promising.”
“Our case counts coming down and are putting us in a very new era in this epidemic in Washington state. And it’s just very encouraging. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel, certainly for me as an epidemiologist, but I just want to really celebrate that point in the epidemic, that it appears to be coming down the backside of the third wave.”
This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 3:40 PM.
