Coronavirus Information...who do you trust?

[Belsnickel]

Just have to love shitting the bed up to the last minute.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/12/17/pfizer-vaccine-supply-states/

Quote:Officials in multiple states said they were alerted late Wednesday that their second shipments of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine had been drastically cut for next week, sparking widespread confusion and conflicting statements from Pfizer and federal officials about who was at fault.

The reduction prompted concern in health departments across the country about whether Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s vaccine accelerator program, could distribute doses quickly enough to meet the target of delivering first shots to 20 million people by year’s end.

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans, said the revised estimates were the result of states’ requesting an expedited timeline for locking in their allocations for the following week; notification of how many doses they could order each week was consequently advanced from Friday to Tuesday. Since Pfizer is producing doses daily, the official said, fewer doses were available Tuesday than will be available on Friday.

But Pfizer released a statement Thursday that seemed to contradict that explanation, saying the company faced no production difficulties and had many more doses immediately available than were being distributed.

“We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses,” the statement read.

The clashing accounts came as Pfizer and the Trump administration negotiate over additional vaccine doses for the United States. Pfizer, which has already committed to providing the government 100 million doses, said that as recently as October, federal officials had turned down its entreaties to lock in another 100 million doses. When those officials sought to buy those doses later, the company said its supplies were already committed to other countries. Now the pharmaceutical giant and the administration are nearing an agreement that would provide the United States with more than 50 million doses, but fewer than 100 million, probably spread over the second and third quarters of 2021, according to people knowledgeable about the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity.