Vermont officials learned Friday morning that the state will receive as many as 975 fewer doses of the Pfizer vaccine than they were expecting, Health Commissioner Mark Levine said Friday.
That’s about a 20% drop, Levine said at Gov. Phil Scott’s biweekly press conference on the Covid-19 crisis.
“I’ve been engaged with all of my colleagues in the regions who are reporting a 25% to 35% decrease in their allocation for next week,” Levine said. The state is expecting 5,850 doses.
“That doesn’t mean we won’t be getting all of the doses; that just means it won’t be coming when we expected,” said Levine.
The Washington Post reported that many states found out late Wednesday that their second shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — expected to arrive next week — had been reduced. The Trump administration has a goal of distributing doses quickly enough that 20 million people will have been vaccinated by the end of the year.
Levine noted that most states are getting larger shipments of the vaccine than Vermont, because the doses are being distributed based on population. The distribution formula doesn’t take into account the extent of outbreaks, Levine noted.
“I guess we’re relying on the government to have done this in an honorable fashion and taken the appropriate percent of the population and applied it fairly across 50 states,” he said.
The health commissioner also noted that each vial contains more than the expected five doses, offsetting some of the reduced allocation.
Levine reported Friday that 107 people in Vermont have died from the virus. The state has started vaccinating people at Vermont’s 37 skilled nursing facilities, where the worst Covid-19 outbreaks have occurred. In the second phase, vaccinations will be administered at assisted living or residential care facilities.
The state reported 86 cases Friday, a drop from the 142 cases reported Thursday but higher than the 60-70 cases reported in the days before. Thirty-six of Friday’s cases were in Chittenden County, the state’s most populous county.
At the press conference, Levine urged Vermonters to follow state guidelines on social distancing for Christmas and other winter holidays.
“I know how hard it is to think of spending another holiday apart,” Levine said. “The guidance though that is still in place calls for us to avoid social gatherings, and the CDC that said that the safest way to celebrate, is to celebrate at home with the people you live with.”
Many of the state’s 42 ongoing outbreaks and 223 non-outbreak situations the DOH are tracking are in health care settings, he said. But he also stressed that not all of Vermont’s deaths occur in nursing homes; 20% of the deaths so far in Vermont have been older people who died at home or at a hospital.
“Please strongly reconsider any gathering that involves a person with underlying medical conditions, or an older Vermonter,” he said.
