The federal government will begin a new initiative to ship vaccine doses directly to commercial pharmacies next week in an effort to make immunizations more accessible to people eligible for the shots.
“This will provide more sites for people to get vaccinated in their communities, and it’s an important component to delivering vaccines equitably,” COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters on Tuesday.
This will be the first phase of the Biden administration’s Federal Retail Pharmacy Program for COVID-19 Vaccination, and Zients warned that the pace of deliveries, beginning Feb. 11, will start out slowly due to supply constraints. President Biden pledged last week that his team had already begun “to ramp up the vaccine supply as fast as we can.”
“In this first phase of the program, supply will be at only about 6,500 stores nationwide before expanding,” Zients said. “In the early phase, many pharmacies across the country will not have vaccine or may have very limited supply.”
The Biden plan aims to vaccinate “priority groups” such as seniors and people with underlying health conditions that could make infection worse. The new program is separate from the partnership with pharmacies to deliver vaccines to long-term care facilities. The Biden administration is aiming to make vaccines available to the general public once larger shares of the vulnerable populations have been immunized.
“Eventually, as we’re able to increase supply, up to 40,000 pharmacies nationwide could provide COVID-19 vaccinations,” Zients said, calling the plan “a critical step to provide the public with convenient trusted places to get vaccinated in their communities.”
The Trump administration announced a similar initiative in November that would send shipments directly to pharmacies such as CVS, Safeway, Walgreens, and Rite Aid but did not offer a timetable. At that time, no vaccines had been granted emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. Since then, the FDA has only authorized the two-dose vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
So far, the federal government has shipped nearly 50 million doses of vaccine to states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of vaccinations has ticked up to over 1.3 million shots administered each day, bringing the tally of people to have received at least one shot to roughly 32.8 million.
