OKLAHOMA CITY -- The Biden administration's plan to open 100 more vaccination sites by the end of the month, initially embraced by governors and health officials, is now meeting pushback as some officials are saying they don't need more places to administer doses. They just need more doses.
Eager to protect more people against the coronavirus, health officials in Oklahoma jumped at the chance to add large, federally supported vaccination sites. They wanted them in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and a third, midsize city, Lawton, thinking the extra help would allow them to send more doses to smaller communities that had yet to benefit.
"We felt like if we could get them in the metro areas, what that would allow us to do is ... free up a lot of our other resources to do more targeted vaccinations in underserved areas," said state Deputy Health Commissioner Keith Reed.
Those plans are now on hold after the state learned that the sites would not come with additional vaccine. Instead, the doses would have to be pulled from the state's existing allocation, and the three sites alone might have used more than half of Oklahoma's supply.
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"We're not prepared to pull the trigger on it unless it comes with vaccine," Reed said.
The Biden administration is preparing to mobilize thousands of staffers and contractors from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Defense and other agencies to open 100 federally supported vaccination sites. They already have been providing money, staffing or logistical support for many state and local efforts, but President Joe Biden's plan specifically refers to launching new sites to help get vaccines to underserved communities.
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain touted the initiative earlier this month after the initial sites were announced in Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif. Since then, the administration has announced a handful of others.
"We just opened our first two federal vaccination centers, in California this week," Klain told NBC News. "We're on our way to 100 of them by the end of this month."
The White House told The Associated Press it could not provide a tally showing how many of the 100 new sites had been announced so far, but said it's confident it will hit its goal.
Getting Americans vaccinated will be key to suppressing the virus and fully reopening the economy. So far, just over 46 million doses have been administered and the administration has pledged to ramp up daily doses to 1.5 million. Since the pandemic began nearly a year ago, more than 27.5 million Americans have been infected and the country is on the cusp of reaching 500,000 deaths.
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Lack of adequate supplies across the country has led to canceled appointments, shuttered megasites and the halting of first doses to ensure that people can get their second shots. Governors have said consistently over the past two weeks that their biggest need isn't a new distribution system, it's just getting more vaccine.
"It's not necessary in Florida," Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said of new sites. "I would take all that energy and I would put that toward more supply of the vaccine."
Hesitancy over adding more vaccination centers without a significant increase in vaccines is coming from some of Biden's biggest supporters. That includes some Democratic governors who roundly criticized the Trump administration's decision to delegate much of the pandemic response to the states.
"Up until now, we've been under the impression that these sites do not come with their own supply of vaccine -- which is the principal thing we need more of, rather than more ways to distribute what we already have," said Tara Lee, spokeswoman for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. "If that changes and allocations are coming with federal sites, that would change our calculations."
Wisconsin health department spokeswoman Elizabeth Goodsitt said the agency is exploring how it might use the vaccination sites proposed by the White House, but added, "Ultimately, we will need more vaccine in the state to support" them.
Other Democrats, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, have expressed similar sentiments.
"The moment that FEMA says we will supply our centers with additional vaccine, we want one," Beshear said.
FEMA officials referred questions about the vaccination site goal to the White House, which described the initial effort as a pilot period in which the government would provide limited doses directly to the vaccination sites.
Jeff Zients, the White House covid-19 coordinator, told governors on a conference call last week that the administration is continuing to try to get more vaccines to the states. By this week, states will be sent a total of 11 million doses, an increase of 500,000 compared with last week.
That's not enough to convince some governors to invite the federal government. The halting effort in part reflects a seismic shift in the way the pandemic is being handled. The Trump administration left many decisions up to the states, but Biden has likened the pandemic response to a war effort requiring a much greater federal role.
BRAZIL STRUGGLES
In Brazil, state governors are pursuing their own vaccine supply plans, with some expressing concern that President Jair Bolsonaro's government won't deliver the shots required to avoid interrupting immunization efforts.
Governors are under pressure from mayors, some of whose vaccine stocks have already been depleted, including three cities in the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro. Northeastern Bahia state's capital, Salvador, suspended vaccinations Thursday because supplies are dwindling. Brazil's two biggest cities, Rio and Sao Paulo, are expected to be without shots in a matter of days.
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The governor who has pushed hardest to shore up his state's own vaccine supply is Sao Paulo's Joao Doria, a former Bolsonaro ally turned adversary. The president repeatedly criticized Doria's deal to purchase 100 million CoronaVac shots from Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac and said the federal government wouldn't buy them.
Bolsonaro reversed course in January, facing delay in the delivery of the only vaccine his administration purchased and watching as other nations began immunizing their citizens while Brazil's 210 million people were on hold.
"It it weren't for this [CoronaVac] shot, Brazil today would be a country without vaccines," Doria told The Associated Press. He added that he is negotiating for 20 million more doses and, if the federal government doesn't buy them, he could sell them to other governors. "It is not for a state government to secure vaccines, but here we are."
Bolsonaro's administration has a deal for 100 million AstraZeneca doses, but only 2 million of them have arrived, with more expected only in March, according to Fiocruz, the Rio-based laboratory that will produce the shots in Brazil.
Brazil's government last month contracted for 46 million CoronaVac shots from Sao Paulo, of which nearly 10 million have been delivered, and is under pressure to sign another deal for 54 million more.
Vaccines purchased by the federal government have been distributed across the nation, which is more expansive than the U.S.' contiguous 48 states. With local authorities administering the shots, the number of people immunized isn't clear, nor is which locations have looming shortages.
With nearly 12 million total doses available to date, 4.9 million people have received shots, according to a consortium of Brazilian media formed last year to counter covid-19 data blackouts.
VARIANT WORRY GROWS
Separately, a new report by British government scientists has found the coronavirus variant first detected in the country to be deadlier than the original virus.
The scientists said last month that there was a "realistic possibility" that the variant was more lethal. Now they say in a new document that it is "likely" that the variant poses an increased risk of hospitalization and death.
The updated findings are based on roughly twice as many studies as their earlier assessment and include more deaths from covid-19 cases caused by the new variant.
The variant is known to be in 82 countries. American scientists have said it could be the dominant version in the United States by March.
The government scientists cited a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In January, that study examined the deaths of 2,583 people, 384 of whom were believed to have had cases caused by the variant. The research estimated that people infected with the variant had a 35% higher risk of dying.
An updated study by the same group relied on 3,382 deaths, 1,722 of which were believed to be from the variant. That study suggested the variant could pose a 71% higher risk of dying.
Information for this article was contributed by Sean Murphy, Geoff Mulvihill, Mauricio Savarese, Scott Bauer, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Brendan Farrington, Rachel La Corte, Ken Miller, Zeke Miller, John O'Connor and Don Thompson of The Associated Press; and by Benjamin Mueller and Carl Zimmer of The New York Times.
