U.S. to Launch COVID-19 Vaccine Pharmacy ‘Partnership’ this Week

The U.S. government is moving ahead of schedule on a vaccine partnership with pharmacies across the country to speed up inoculations with the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and it will start the program this week, HHS Secretary Alex Azar announced yesterday.

The program’s accelerated start date comes as the government faces intense criticism for moving slower than projected on its nationwide vaccination initiative.

“The plan had been to ramp up this partnership over time because vaccine supply would not be sufficient to spread across all of the pharmacy partners right away,” Azar said in a press briefing. “But to help give states as many options as possible for vaccine administration, we’re launching the program this week, and states can choose particular [pharmacy] partners to send vaccines to now.”

Azar said that the partnership program, which has already enrolled tens of thousands of pharmacies, will eventually expand to include more than 40,000 pharmacy locations from 19 chains and associations in the U.S.

HHS also announced Wednesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will award more than $3 billion to states, localities and territories before Jan. 19 to aid in vaccinations. Jurisdictions will also receive more than $19 billion before that date to support testing, contact tracing, surveillance, containment and mitigation efforts, the department said. The funds will be allocated based on population.

Though the administration aimed to have 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020, it didn’t come close to realizing that goal. According to CDC data, approximately 4.8 million people had received initial shots as of Tuesday morning. Azar claimed that nearly 20 million doses have been physically distributed and another 4.1 million doses have been allocated for jurisdictions to order this week.

Azar cited a substantial increase in vaccinations in the recent days and said he expects the rate to continue to accelerate in the coming weeks, claiming that “we knew that would be the case from the way states drew up their plans.” He stressed that states should not wait to finish completing vaccinations for certain high-risk groups, such as healthcare workers, and advised them to move on to administering shots to elderly patients and to especially vulnerable populations in order to keep vaccinations rolling and prevent shots from sitting around.

“Providing flexibility around these phases rather than proposing heavy-handed penalties for vaccine administration is the best way to get more shots in arms faster,” he said.

CVS Health and Walgreens said that they expect to finish administering initial vaccine shots in skilled nursing facilities by Jan. 25. The two companies, along with Managed Health Care Associates, a healthcare service company, are participating in a CDC initiative to vaccinate residents and staff in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. The program began inoculations in late December in long-term care facilities and is now active in 49 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, Walgreens said. — James Miessler