Vaccine distribution

[Snorlax94]

It was 8 days ago that the Moderna vaccine was approved.  I am unable to find any indication that it has arrived in Santa Clara County or Los Angeles County.

SCC's twitter feed and web pages do not indicate any arrival.  The Mercury News doesn't indicate any arrival.  

LA County seems to have removed the link to their vaccine dashboard from the page on the vaccine.  I don't see the link at the their COVID Surveillance Dashboard The dashboard hasn't been updated in 9 days.  Their latest (Dec. 21) press release on the vaccine speaks of anticipating the arrival of 165K  doses (116,600 Moderna; 48,750 Pfizer).

WHY ISN'T THE MEDIA ASKING WHERE IT IS? 
When I look at Google News, I see no questions asked.  When I look at the Mercury News, I see no questions asked.

If the government is shipping it, the county health departments should be working as hard as possible to get it into those at risk of DYING.

LA County suffered 427 deaths from Dec. 21 to Dec 24.  Obviously those deaths wouldn't be prevented by the vaccine, but future deaths could have been.  If 10M people are having 100  deaths a day, how many excess deaths do we expect to die in SCC, in California, in the US by a 1-day delay in getting the vaccine into arms?  by 7 days?

---

On 12/23, OWS indicated they allocated 7.9M doses of vaccine (not just Pfizer, as mis-reported in print on that web page) of which 7.8 was to be shipped by 12/24.   On the 3rd week (last partial week in Dec.), they are planning to allocate 4.67M doses (2.67M P, 2M M), for a total of 15.47M in December to early January (vs 20M they were hoping for).

So, if it was 2.9M shipped the first week and 7.8M shipped by 12/24, that should be 10.7M shipped by 12/24.

As of the morning of 12/26, the CDC claims that 9.5M doses have been shipped and 1.9M have been vaccinated. (4.6M shipped by 12/21 was the only previous posting). 

[sarcasm]What's 0.8M more or less?[/sarcasm]


Maybe it is the case that LA and SCC are the last counties in the US to receive any.  Or maybe "shipped" means "we took it from the manufacturer", despite the fact that CDC labels the data as "distributed" but the fine print says "recorded as shipped".

MT,
I share your concern about the mismatches in the data and befuddlement at the lack of transparency. I am definitely NOT OKAY just sending off all the vaccine to hospitals, government agencies and pharmacies while requiring no accurate reporting and no transparency. We have already seen even hospitals like Stanford Hospital will have their “agorithms” providing questionable prioritization, just imagine what happens when this goes to for-profit companies and unknown government agencies.

So for people concerned about this, I say, rather than just conplaining here online, let’s contact our local officials. In the past, I’ve actually found city councils and supervisors to be accessible and responsive. They may not do what I ask, but they reply, and if enough people demand the same thing, we may get some action.

My question is, what should I demand in a letter to the SCC Supervisor, my City Council and my local newspaper?

Here is my stab: for every dose of vaccine, they should report within 1 week:
1) # doses, mfgr and date received
2) # doses injected
3) a reporting of *who* got those shots, by category. If 5,000 doses went to Stanford Hospital, and 5,000 doses are given within a week to doctors at Stanford Hospital, that’s enough for me. But if 50,000 doses a week go to the Santa Clara Dept of Health to go to “essential frontline workers including police and teachers” week after week, I want a more detailing accounting of what happened to those doses. Because I am going to bet you without transparency, reporting, and accountability, an awful lot of doses are going to disappear to other, non-essential, non-frontline government employees and their households and a giant “friends of government” slush fund supply. Similarly, if CVS gets 50,000 doses a week “for High need communities including ltcfs” They should list which cvss had some, which ltcfs received vaccine, and how many doses for each ltcf. Because I fear CVS will quickly consume many times as many doses as the total population of all ltcfs in the county, and it will just be a mystery where those doses went off to.

If the local CVSs receive 10,000 doses a week for elderly SCc residents 75+, if the report they gave all 10,000 to SCC residents and they checked IDs for age and residency, then I am okay with that although someone should aso occasionally audit the reports. But without this, i fear they will just take vaccine week after week saying it is for a small prioritized group and the vaccine will just disappear, maybe to their high-end concierge clients or large corporations that pay a premium for on-site vaccination of young, non-essential, non-frontline employees (like investment firms, banks, professional sports teams, friends of CVS and anyone with deep pockets).

I said this early on, if the vaccine is desirable (which it is), so so many doses are just going to disappear in ways that defy the statistics of how many people belong in each prioritized category.

So what reports and figures should we demand from our counties and newspapers?

[magnus]

8 Germans accidentally received 5x the dosage.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health...SKBN2921F1

4 of them have been sent to the hospital to observe flu like symptoms.

Hopefully their second dosage will cause the appropriate response.

[lex24]

It was 8 days ago that the Moderna vaccine was approved.  I am unable to find any indication that it has arrived in Santa Clara County or Los Angeles County.

SCC's twitter feed and web pages do not indicate any arrival.  The Mercury News doesn't indicate any arrival.  

LA County seems to have removed the link to their vaccine dashboard from the page on the vaccine.  I don't see the link at the their COVID Surveillance Dashboard The dashboard hasn't been updated in 9 days.  Their latest (Dec. 21) press release on the vaccine speaks of anticipating the arrival of 165K  doses (116,600 Moderna; 48,750 Pfizer).

WHY ISN'T THE MEDIA ASKING WHERE IT IS? 
When I look at Google News, I see no questions asked.  When I look at the Mercury News, I see no questions asked.

If the government is shipping it, the county health departments should be working as hard as possible to get it into those at risk of DYING.

LA County suffered 427 deaths from Dec. 21 to Dec 24.  Obviously those deaths wouldn't be prevented by the vaccine, but future deaths could have been.  If 10M people are having 100  deaths a day, how many excess deaths do we expect to die in SCC, in California, in the US by a 1-day delay in getting the vaccine into arms?  by 7 days?

---

On 12/23, OWS indicated they allocated 7.9M doses of vaccine (not just Pfizer, as mis-reported in print on that web page) of which 7.8 was to be shipped by 12/24.   On the 3rd week (last partial week in Dec.), they are planning to allocate 4.67M doses (2.67M P, 2M M), for a total of 15.47M in December to early January (vs 20M they were hoping for).

So, if it was 2.9M shipped the first week and 7.8M shipped by 12/24, that should be 10.7M shipped by 12/24.

As of the morning of 12/26, the CDC claims that 9.5M doses have been shipped and 1.9M have been vaccinated. (4.6M shipped by 12/21 was the only previous posting). 

[sarcasm]What's 0.8M more or less?[/sarcasm]


Maybe it is the case that LA and SCC are the last counties in the US to receive any.  Or maybe "shipped" means "we took it from the manufacturer", despite the fact that CDC labels the data as "distributed" but the fine print says "recorded as shipped".

MT,
I share your concern about the mismatches in the data and befuddlement at the lack of transparency. I am definitely NOT OKAY just sending off all the vaccine to hospitals, government agencies and pharmacies while requiring no accurate reporting and no transparency. We have already seen even hospitals like Stanford Hospital will have their “agorithms” providing questionable prioritization, just imagine what happens when this goes to for-profit companies and unknown government agencies.

So for people concerned about this, I say, rather than just conplaining here online, let’s contact our local officials. In the past, I’ve actually found city councils and supervisors to be accessible and responsive. They may not do what I ask, but they reply, and if enough people demand the same thing, we may get some action.

My question is, what should I demand in a letter to the SCC Supervisor, my City Council and my local newspaper?

Here is my stab: for every dose of vaccine, they should report within 1 week:
1) # doses, mfgr and date received
2) # doses injected
3) a reporting of *who* got those shots, by category. If 5,000 doses went to Stanford Hospital, and 5,000 doses are given within a week to doctors at Stanford Hospital, that’s enough for me. But if 50,000 doses a week go to the Santa Clara Dept of Health to go to “essential frontline workers including police and teachers” week after week, I want a more detailing accounting of what happened to those doses. Because I am going to bet you without transparency, reporting, and accountability, an awful lot of doses are going to disappear to other, non-essential, non-frontline government employees and their households and a giant “friends of government” slush fund supply. Similarly, if CVS gets 50,000 doses a week “for High need communities including ltcfs” They should list which cvss had some, which ltcfs received vaccine, and how many doses for each ltcf. Because I fear CVS will quickly consume many times as many doses as the total population of all ltcfs in the county, and it will just be a mystery where those doses went off to.

If the local CVSs receive 10,000 doses a week for elderly SCc residents 75+, if the report they gave all 10,000 to SCC residents and they checked IDs for age and residency, then I am okay with that although someone should aso occasionally audit the reports. But without this,  i fear they will just take vaccine week after week saying it is for a small prioritized group and the vaccine will just disappear, maybe to their high-end concierge clients or large corporations that pay a premium for on-site vaccination of young, non-essential, non-frontline employees (like investment firms, banks, professional sports teams, friends of CVS and anyone with deep pockets).

I said this early on, if the vaccine is desirable (which it is), so so many doses are just going to disappear in ways that defy the statistics of how many people belong in each prioritized category.

So what reports and figures should we demand from our counties and newspapers?

Let’s get real here.  There is no way that a vaccination program running at warp speed is not going to have its fair share of glitches.  Accidental and otherwise.  Perfection is not going to happen.  I’ll settle for competent.  And I suspect it is and will be.

[M T]

SCC STILL HASN'T REPORTED THAT IT GOT THE SECOND SET OF VACCINE, MUCH LESS A THIRD!  Not on their web site, not on Twitter, not on Facebook, nothing in the Mercury News.  No update on vaccinations given.

Is it declining to get vaccine because it can't figure out how to give shots?

California has finally joined the program where CVS and Walgreens will give shots to LTCF.   Three weeks or more too late, and still a month out for them to vaccinate who was supposed to be group 1A.  (Yet the Governor wants his 4 kids back in school by mid-February.)

The CDC reports that California has given only 20% (294K) of the 1.476M doses that have been shipped, or about 25% of the doses received before this week.   I recall OWS indicated vaccines had to be used in 3 weeks before they had to be shipped back..  I've since seen contradictory info since, so maybe that is wrong.

EDIT: Pfizer indicates up to 35 days (30 in shipping container, 5 in refrigerator after that) storage without a super freezer.

My understanding is that California received 327K Pfizer doses about Dec. 14 (3 weeks would be Jan 4), 233K Pfizer + 622K Moderna during the pre-Christmas week, so that would be a total of 1.182M. If that's accurate, that would mean 294K have been shipped this week.

If that 3 weeks is correct, I HOPE there will be a lot of shots given over the next 5 days!!! If you are associated with an organization (County health office or medical organization) that has the vaccine, make it happen. It is going to reflect really poorly on you if you have to ship life saving medicine back.

[Goose]

EDIT:  Pfizer indicates up to 35 days (30 in shipping container, 5 in refrigerator after that) storage without a super freezer.

I am virtually certain the vast majority of the unused vaccine is sitting in "super freezers" at places like Stanford, UCSF, etc. Heck, even San Mateo County has one (brand new). That's not the problem. It is the glacially (pun intended) slow delivery into arms that we should be rightly concerned about.

[Farm93]

EDIT:  Pfizer indicates up to 35 days (30 in shipping container, 5 in refrigerator after that) storage without a super freezer.

I am virtually certain the vast majority of the unused vaccine is sitting in "super freezers" at places like Stanford, UCSF, etc. Heck, even San Mateo County has one (brand new). That's not the problem. It is the glacially (pun intended) slow delivery into arms that we should be rightly concerned about.

Essentially we have America's biggest pharmaceutical launch being handled by the military, the state governments, county health officials, health care providers, and pharmacies.  And they are doing this launch without a lot of prep or existing lines of communication.

What could possibly go wrong?

It is certainly reasonable in my mind that almost every entity in the supply chain would want to keep doses in reserve because many will recognize that if they ship one dose then they should have another one in reserve for that second dose order 3-4 weeks later.   If every step in the chain has a similar logic, and few are working to reduce that desire for safety stock, then many of the first ~30 million doses will just sit in the supply chain.

That's not a scandal in my mind, that is just logical human behavior.   And something many of the world's be companies combat relentlessly to become profitable, reliable and successful.   That just doesn't describe most of the entities in this mix.

That's pretty much why I never banked on the promised dates and added my own buffer to the expectations.  There are a lot of entities in this process and many of them are not known for distributing stuff to consumers.   Supply chain is this week's problem, but there will be others along the way.

If I am vaccinated prior to the start of the 2021 Stanford Football season, I will be thrilled.

[dabigv13]

Yikes

[M T]

EDIT:  Pfizer indicates up to 35 days (30 in shipping container, 5 in refrigerator after that) storage without a super freezer.

I am virtually certain the vast majority of the unused vaccine is sitting in "super freezers" at places like Stanford, UCSF, etc. Heck, even San Mateo County has one (brand new). That's not the problem. It is the glacially (pun intended) slow delivery into arms that we should be rightly concerned about.

There are 58 counties in California.  Even San Mateo county is the 14th largest.   I know 975 Pfizer doses were sent to Tuolomne county, about 25% of which were to go to another county.  I doubt either of those counties has a super freezer.   I'd bet that half of the 3142 counties in the US do not have access to ultra-cold freezers.

While this might not be an issue for your or my county, and potentially not for the largest 139 counties with 50% of the US population (and, hence, 50% of the vaccine), I do think it is a problem for large areas of the US.

[Goose]

EDIT:  Pfizer indicates up to 35 days (30 in shipping container, 5 in refrigerator after that) storage without a super freezer.

I am virtually certain the vast majority of the unused vaccine is sitting in "super freezers" at places like Stanford, UCSF, etc. Heck, even San Mateo County has one (brand new). That's not the problem. It is the glacially (pun intended) slow delivery into arms that we should be rightly concerned about.

There are 58 counties in California.  Even San Mateo county is the 14th largest.   I know 975 Pfizer doses were sent to Tuolomne county, about 25% of which were to go to another county.  I doubt either of those counties has a super freezer.   I'd bet that half of the 3142 counties in the US do not have access to ultra-cold freezers.

While this might not be an issue for your or my county, and potentially not for the largest 139 counties with 50% of the US population (and, hence, 50% of the vaccine), I do think it is a problem for large areas of the US.

I am sure it would be if they were being asked to store lots of vaccine, but as you point out, they are not. That is why Tuolomne county and other small counties need to give their 975 doses within 35 days. That is 28 a day. Not really a big ask. It does take some organization because you do want to use up all the vaccine you have thawed and diluted within 5 days, but at 5 (maybe 6) doses per vial, that isn't too hard. It will be more of a problem when they are vaccinating the "general public". The State will undoubtedly not send them more than they say they can distribute in any given time period, say two weeks. Sending a shipment every two weeks isn't asking much.  The State and bigger counties certainly have room to store the vaccine for the smaller counties until they need it.

[chrisk]

EDIT:  Pfizer indicates up to 35 days (30 in shipping container, 5 in refrigerator after that) storage without a super freezer.

I am virtually certain the vast majority of the unused vaccine is sitting in "super freezers" at places like Stanford, UCSF, etc. Heck, even San Mateo County has one (brand new). That's not the problem. It is the glacially (pun intended) slow delivery into arms that we should be rightly concerned about.

There are 58 counties in California.  Even San Mateo county is the 14th largest.   I know 975 Pfizer doses were sent to Tuolomne county, about 25% of which were to go to another county.  I doubt either of those counties has a super freezer.   I'd bet that half of the 3142 counties in the US do not have access to ultra-cold freezers.

While this might not be an issue for your or my county, and potentially not for the largest 139 counties with 50% of the US population (and, hence, 50% of the vaccine), I do think it is a problem for large areas of the US.

I am sure it would be if they were being asked to store lots of vaccine, but as you point out, they are not. That is why Tuolomne county and other small counties need to give their 975 doses within 35 days. That is 28 a day. Not really a big ask. It does take some organization because you do want to use up all the vaccine you have thawed and diluted within 5 days, but at 5 (maybe 6) doses per vial, that isn't too hard. It will be more of a problem when they are vaccinating the "general public". The State will undoubtedly not send them more than they say they can distribute in any given time period, say two weeks. Sending a shipment every two weeks isn't asking much.  The State and bigger counties certainly have room to store the vaccine for the smaller counties until they need it.

A lot of counties have no urgency. Rural counties in Northern and southern Georgia have been distributed vaccine but have no urgency or demand to use it.

Then there is the Wisconsin worker who purposely spoiled over 500 doses, 57 of which were injected before the problem was discovered.

[BostonCard]

A lot of counties have no urgency.  Rural counties in Northern and southern Georgia have been distributed vaccine but have no urgency or demand to use it.

Then there is the Wisconsin worker who purposely spoiled over 500 doses, 57 of which were injected before the problem was discovered.

What in the actual f---?  Here's the story: https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavir...story.html

Also:

BC