Trump?s Operation Warp Speed promised a flood of covid vaccines. Instead, states are expecting a trickle. - The Washington Post

To make sure supplies don’t run out and leave some people only partially immunized, the government said it would stagger deliveries to ensure that states have enough supply for the second shot, required 21 days later for the Pfizer vaccine, which is expected to be first to gain approval.Lower-than-anticipated allocations have caused widespread confusion and concern in states, which are beginning to grasp the level of vaccine scarcity they will confront in the early going of the massive vaccination campaign.“I come from a family of seven siblings, and best practice was always to have seven of everything being given out,” said Joe Sullivan, a senior health adviser in Oregon, which is expecting about 35,000 doses in the initial wave from Pfizer. Several states said they were expecting an allocation from Moderna about twice the size of the initial wave from Pfizer, roughly a week later.The flow is expected to accelerate in January and February but still will not meet the bold predictions of Trump and the leader of Operation Warp Speed, pharmaceutical executive Moncef Slaoui, who said in the White House Rose Garden in May that he was confident “several hundred million” doses of vaccine would be ready by the end of December.Instead, Slaoui said this past week that officials are now planning to ship 35 to 40 million doses by the end of the year, enough for up to 20 million people under a two-shot regimen.Pfizer is expected to win emergency authorization for its vaccine soon after an FDA advisory committee meets on Dec. 10. Other companies have either declined to say how much vaccine they expect to have available or won’t report phase 3 clinical data until later in 2021.Americans and state officials are already having to adjust their expectations to a slower rollout of vaccines.Health-care workers, nursing home residents should get coronavirus vaccine first, panel saysOperation Warp Speed officials said that, within 24 hours of the Pfizer vaccine winning clearance, the government would begin releasing 6.4 million doses, in two stages: enough for the first shot, followed three weeks later by enough for the second shot.