COVID vaccination rollout in NC limited by supply. A 3rd vaccine would help, Cohen says
Having another approved COVID-19 vaccine will offer North Carolina its best hope of expediting the prolonged vaccination effort, Dr. Mandy Cohen said Monday.
“I’m hopeful for another vaccine to come onto the market,” the Secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services told the Council of State during a virtual COVID-19 briefing.
“I honestly think that is the thing that is needed in order to change the supply game overall, and so we will look forward to that,” Cohen said.
A third vaccine could be on its way. Friday, Johnson & Johnson announced that its COVID-19 vaccine is 66% effective at preventing moderate to severe courses of COVID-19. It also prevented hospitalization or death from the virus a month after patients took the shot, the company said.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is a single dose, while the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which have received emergency use authorizations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, require two shots.
During Monday’s meeting, Cohen said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine could receive emergency authorization by the end of February. The company has not said how many doses it would be able to produce, Cohen said, but she expressed confidence that providers across the state could vaccinate many more people.
“The last couple of weeks have demonstrated to us that we, as a state, could probably vaccinate three times the number of people than the supply that we are getting,” Cohen said.
The state has administered more than 1 million vaccine doses, NC DHHS said Monday in a news release, with providers giving more than 99% of first doses. More than 795,000 North Carolina residents have received at least one dose of vaccine.
For the next three weeks, North Carolina is expected to receive about 145,000 first doses of vaccine every week. That’s a 15% increase from the roughly 120,000 doses the state had been receiving, but still not enough to meet the steep demand, Cohen said.
In order to inoculate every adult in the state against COVID-19, Cohen said, DHHS would need 17 to 18 million doses of vaccine. That assumes the options are either the Moderna or the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, each with two doses.
“The limitation that we’re going to continue to run into and we’re going to run into week over week until there is more vaccine, is we just don’t have enough supply to get to everybody, and it is frustrating across the board,” Cohen said.
Cohen answered questions Monday about why agricultural workers, firefighters, police officers and teachers aren’t in the highest-priority groups for the COVID-19 vaccine. North Carolina’s prioritization is focused on medical workers, Cohen said, as well as those over 65 years old. Older adults have made up 83% of the state’s deaths from the virus, she said.
“There’s just not away enough ways for those numbers to split,” Cohen said.
No public notice of meeting
Public notice of Monday’s meeting did not appear on the N.C. Secretary of State’s calendar of state government public meetings, nor did members of the press receive routine notice. The Council of State is scheduled to meet Tuesday at 9 a.m., which does appear on the Secretary of State’s calendar.
At least six members of the 10-person Council of State either spoke at Monday’s meeting or appeared via webcam, including Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, Attorney General Josh Stein, State Treasurer Dale Folwell, State Auditor Beth Wood, Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey and Labor Secretary Josh Dobson.
“You can’t just say something is an unofficial meeting of the Council of State when a majority of the Council of State’s here,” Folwell said during Monday’s meeting. “I don’t think that’s the way the laws work.”
Folwell’s office streamed part of the meeting on the N.C. Department of State Treasurer’s Facebook page.
Cohen responds to criticism
During Monday’s meeting, Cohen addressed concerns about North Carolina’s COVID-19 Vaccine Management System (CVMS), an Accenture web platform on which the state is supposed to spend $7 million by the end of May.
The N.C. Watchdog Reporting Network found that local health department officials have grown frustrated with CVMS, with staffers uploading patient information manually and the system lagging in its reporting of doses administered by providers.
“I am 100% glad that we chose to build our own system,” Cohen said Monday. “The federal system has been a disaster.”
DHHS officials hope, Cohen added, to have the vaccine platform linked with electronic health records by the end of the month in order to prevent providers from having to duplicate data entry efforts.
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Greensboro Republican, told Cohen that he has received calls from people frustrated with the rollout who feel like the effort has not been as transparent as it could be. Robinson mentioned the decision two weeks ago to focus vaccine distribution at a pair of megasites in Charlotte, forcing Greensboro’s Cone Health to postpone 10,400 appointments.
“There are some very dissatisfied North Carolinians out there when it comes to this vaccine, and I think we need to all keep that in mind and work hard to rectify that situation,” Robinson said, adding that he was willing to work with Cohen and Gov. Roy Cooper to ease the frustration.
State Auditor Beth Wood, a Democrat, urged Cohen to “over communicate” details about the vaccine rollout to help the public understand the logisitical challenges in vaccinating millions of adults.
Cohen said members of the Council of State should focus their advocacy efforts on convincing officials in Washington, D.C. to increase the state’s allocation.
“We are getting first vaccines out as quickly as they come in,” Cohen said. “We have literally zero on the shelf in terms of first vaccine, and it’s just we need more vaccine supply as we go forward here.”
This story was originally published February 1, 2021 at 6:42 PM.