DETROIT / LOS ANGELES / NEW YORK: The U.S. rollout of COVID-19 vaccine at Moderna Inc began on Saturday, with more than 3,700 sites expected to start receiving and administering shots as early as Monday, significantly expanding the spread out last week by Pfizer Inc.
Among the top coronavirus diseases and deaths, Moderna has already moved vaccine products from their manufacturing plants to warehouses operated by distributor McKesson Corp.
Workers Saturday were packing vaccines into ships and loading them onto trucks, U.S. Army General Gustave Perna said at a news conference. Trucks will start on Sunday and loads will begin arriving at health care providers as early as Monday, he said.
Doses of vaccines must travel with security guards, including U.S. Marshals, and will be stored in locked refrigerators. U.S. plans call on at-risk groups such as the elderly in nursing homes and medical staff to get injections first.
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved an emergency use permit for the Moderna vaccine, the second COVID-19 vaccine to be approved. A panel of outside advisers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted Saturday to recommend the Moderna vaccine for use in people 18 and older, according to media reports.
The injection developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNtech SE was approved in December. 11.
Catalent Inc pharmaceutical services provider facility in Bloomington, Indiana, fills and packs vials with Moderna vaccines and delivers them to McKesson. The company delivers them from its facilities including those in Louisville, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee, which are close to air hubs for United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. .
Pfizer set up its own circulation system. The U.S. government’s vaccination program, called Operation Warp Speed, is in charge of logistics for the distribution of Moderna under Perna.
‘My fault’
Perna apologized to U.S. regulators for being upset about access to the vaccine after the U.S. government reduced the number of doses states would receive in the coming week.
States including Oregon and Washington, which are rising to vaccinate health care workers as soon as possible, said their satisfaction had dropped as much as 40%.
Perna said he made a mistake in estimating the number of doses that would be cleared by regulators for delivery, which was lower than the number of doses dispensed.
A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said 7.9 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would be delivered nationally this week.
Moderna’s delivery system will have some of the same players as Pfizer’s but will differ in key ways.
Transport companies UPS and FedEx prioritize vaccinations on planes and trucks carrying holiday gifts and other goods. Their drivers handle most of the Moderna vaccine deliveries that have passed. They go directly to vaccine sites, unlike Pfizer’s which have been sent to large hubs and redistributed.
“We added a lot of flights, a lot of temporary staff. (Vaccines) are only a few of total quantities, ”said Wes Wheeler, a UPS agency that oversees vaccine shipping.
Moderna vaccine is available in doses as small as 100 doses and can be stored for 30 days in refrigerators at normal temperatures, while the inoculations from Pfizer come in boxes of 975 doses, must be transported and stored at -70 Celsius (-94 F), and can be maintained for just five days at normal cooling temperatures.
Initial doses were given to health professionals. Programs are expected to begin with the development of Walgreens and CVS to roll out the Pfizer vaccine to long-term care facilities on Monday. The CDC advisory panel on Sunday will consider which groups should get the vaccine next.
Perna said the United States is on track to get enough doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines by the end of the year to protect 20 million people, as the government had expected, but delivery of those doses could continue into the first week of January. Healthcare experts predict that it will take a long time into 2021 for a large number of Americans to be circulated.
Both vaccines were approximately 95% effective in preventing illness in clinical trials that found no adverse safety issues.