Beaufort Co. faces limited supply of COVID-19 vaccines: ‘It’s terribly frustrating’
Steven Kite, 71, finally had a bit of hope.
After mostly staying indoors during the pandemic, the Hilton Head Island resident on Jan. 14 managed to book an appointment in February to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Kite, who’s retired and lives at Sea Pines Resort, scheduled his initial Pfizer-BioNTech shot at Beaufort Memorial Hospital.
His excitement, though, was fleeting.
The hospital on Jan. 15 announced it was canceling more than 6,000 appointments through March 30, citing a statewide shortage of Pfizer doses. Kite was among those out of luck.
“Everything’s just totally up in the air,” Kite said Wednesday. “It’s terribly frustrating. … Those of us who really want to get the vaccine are just left hanging.”
The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control on Jan. 15 told the S.C. Hospital Association that medical centers would get only 20-25% of the Pfizer doses they requested for first shots this past week, even though state leaders had expanded Phase 1a eligibility to include residents 70 or older.
Local hospital executives — who were blindsided by the news — quickly moved to cancel appointments due to the shortfall.
Kite, along with thousands of other residents in Beaufort and Jasper counties, is now caught in the ensuing fallout. He still doesn’t know when his appointment will be rescheduled. And he didn’t get a shot on Thursday during Beaufort Memorial Hospital’s drive-thru vaccination clinic outside the Beaufort High School Stadium, which was reserved for people who had appointments canceled last week.
“It’s like chasing your tail,” Kite said.
It’s difficult to predict when residents like Kite will get inoculated, largely due to weekly allocation changes, a new administration in Washington, D.C., and a limited amount of reliable vaccine data.
Jan. 15, though, clearly marked the beginning of a confusing dilemma that health care officials and seniors must navigate. The day’s chaotic chain of events confirmed that local residents’ demand for doses far outweighs the available supply.
A vaccine free-for-all is underway.
What happened?
The outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, had a blunt message for states on Jan. 12: “We clearly have enough vaccine at this point to expand.”
Redfield and Alex M. Azar, then-secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told reporters the Trump administration was making a slew of last-minute policy changes in a bid to speed up the nation’s vaccine rollout.
Azar said federal officials would immediately release all second doses held in a stockpile — which implied those doses could partially be used as first shots — and announced that the CDC was urging states to begin inoculating people 65 or older. Both Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines use recommended two-dose regimens.
(Azar’s Jan. 12 comments came a day after Gov. Henry McMaster said that S.C. residents 70 or older would become eligible for vaccinations starting Jan. 13.)
Because of Azar’s words, health departments anticipated an influx of doses for this past week, according to The Washington Post.
But The Post on Jan. 15 reported there was no federal reserve of second doses. Operation Warp Speed had already been distributing all available doses.
Hospitals around the country, reeling from the unexpected shortfall, were forced to cancel thousands of vaccine appointments, from the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City to Florida’s Baptist Health.
DHEC early Jan. 15 told SCHA President and CEO Thornton Kirby that S.C. hospitals would get “significantly less vaccine” than they wanted.
“The state expects to receive the same amount of Pfizer vaccine next week that we have been getting, but hospital requests this week totaled four times that amount,” Kirby wrote in a Jan. 15 email, which was obtained by The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette.
Kirby added that hospitals would still get 100% of second doses.
The local impact was immense. Beaufort Memorial Hospital announced it was canceling more than 6,000 appointments because the state said the hospital wouldn’t get more than 2,000 doses this past week, nor would it receive near equal allocations in the weeks to come. Hilton Head Regional Healthcare canceled roughly 300 appointments scheduled for early last week.
Dr. Brannon Traxler, DHEC’s interim director of public health, told reporters Wednesday that South Carolina typically gets 63,000 first doses every week, and she doesn’t expect that to change any time soon.
There’s an estimated 987,000 people in Phase 1a statewide, according to DHEC.
Only 145,216 first Pfizer doses had been administered in the state as of Thursday.
Limited data
It’s all a numbers game now. But local health care leaders still don’t know how many doses they will receive in the coming weeks.
Operation Warp Speed — which President Joe Biden will soon rename — updates states’ vaccine allocations week-to-week.
DHEC, for its part, asks hospitals to place shipment orders in the CDC’s Vaccine Administration Management System, or VAMS, by noon on Tuesdays. That same day, DHEC typically learns what its next statewide allocation will be, said Stephen White, DHEC’s director of immunizations.
By Thursday or Friday, DHEC can confirm medical centers’ specific shipments.
It’s difficult, though, to calculate the average number of doses already entering Beaufort and Jasper counties each week. DHEC has been publishing facility-level vaccine data only since Jan. 1. And allocations have fluctuated dramatically during that time.
The counties received 490 new Pfizer doses from Jan. 3 to Jan. 9, according to DHEC. They got 1,400 doses the week after that.
(It’s impossible to determine the total number of Moderna doses the counties receive each week, based on state data. DHEC hasn’t published data on how many doses individual Publix, Kroger, Harris Teeter and Walgreens stores got last week.)
Russell Baxley, CEO of Beaufort Memorial Hospital, and Daisy Burroughs, a spokesperson for Hilton Head Regional Healthcare, in separate statements Wednesday wrote that weekly shipments will vary and there’s no way to tell what’s ahead.
Beaufort and Jasper counties had received 8,390 total Pfizer doses as of Thursday and had vaccinated at least 5,640 people with a first dose. At least 1,562 residents and staff at long-term care facilities had received Moderna’s vaccine as of Wednesday.
The counties’ Pfizer utilization rate on Tuesday was high (roughly 108% of all local doses had been used), but it dipped to 79% Wednesday after hospitals received this past week’s allocation. The utilization rate for first doses was roughly 81% as of Thursday.
Baxley estimated there were at least 15,000 people in Beaufort Memorial Hospital’s vaccination queue as of Wednesday. Burroughs wrote that up to 20,000 appointments were booked at Tenet Healthcare’s local facilities.
More than 40,000 people 70 or older are living in Beaufort and Jasper counties, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. They all qualify for shots under Phase 1a.
‘Up in the air’
Beaufort Memorial Hospital is rescheduling people week to week as first doses become available, based on the order in which people originally scheduled appointments or requested to be scheduled for a shot. Hilton Head Regional Healthcare rescheduled its canceled vaccinations for this week.
It’s hard, though, to predict how long it will take the counties’ hospitals to work through any backlogs.
That’s because many details remain “up in the air,” as Hilton Head resident Kite put it.
While Traxler, of DHEC, says the state’s weekly allocation is expected to remain steady through at least the end of January, both Pfizer and Moderna are already ramping up production, racing to meet a late March deadline of each supplying 100 million doses to the United States.
Only about 37 million doses had been distributed nationwide as of Thursday, according to the CDC.
Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine candidate will likely go before U.S. regulators in February, too. And while the federal government expects the company to have doses only in the “single-digit millions” by late February — as opposed to the 12 million doses originally laid out in Johnson & Johnson’s contract — that expected authorization will boost U.S. vaccination efforts.
Local vaccine redistribution, meanwhile, may also help some residents get rescheduled quickly.
Beaufort Memorial Hospital received 1,000 doses from the Medical University of South Carolina to host a drive-thru clinic Thursday outside the Beaufort High School Stadium.
All of those promising developments, though, don’t guarantee a smooth end to January.
Seniors in Beaufort and Jasper counties remain confused, angry and discouraged by the complicated registration process and the lack of available appointments.
Stephen Carter, 75, of Hilton Head, tried to access VAMS multiple times though Hilton Head Hospital earlier this month.
He didn’t immediately get a link for the finicky CDC system, so he later tried to sign up via Beaufort Memorial Hospital (medical centers have been collecting peoples’ email addresses, then uploading those into VAMS to generate an invitation so residents can use the system and register for shots).
He eventually got into VAMS on Jan. 15 to schedule a Hilton Head Hospital appointment, Carter said.
The earliest slot available? April 7.
Carter, an architect, said he’s not sure if that reservation means anything, at this point.
“Who in the world is in charge?” he asked.
