COVID-19 vaccine supplies to states, pharmacies increasing by another notch

The weekly supply of coronavirus vaccines being sent to states is ratcheting up again, from 11 million doses to 13.5 million, the White House announced Tuesday, as the availability of the vaccine continues to run far behind demand.

According to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, the government is also providing more vaccine directly to pharmacies, increasing the number of doses per week from 1 million to 2 million.

That increase is part of a gradual expansion of Americans’ ability to sign up for inoculation directly from drugstores familiar to them. Psaki said the latest number of weekly vaccine doses that states will start to receive represents a 57% increase from the supply when President Biden was inaugurated Jan. 20. The increase comes from an anticipated scale-up in manufacturing rather than changes initiated by the new administration.

State and local health departments continue to be overwhelmed nearly two months into the start of the largest mass vaccination campaign in U.S. history, with residents eager for protection from COVID-19, the coronavirus-caused disease that has killed more than 485,000 people in the United States.

Tuesday’s announcement came five days after Biden disclosed that his administration had finished an agreement with two vaccine manufacturers for an additional 200 million doses by the end of July. The government, exercising options built into contracts negotiated last year, purchased half those doses from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech, and the other half from Moderna. The vaccines have been authorized for emergency use in the United States.

That purchase should provide enough vaccine doses by midsummer to cover every U.S. adult. But it did not hasten the supply to surmount current shortages.