After 1st criticizing pace, McMaster now happy with COVID-19 vaccine rollout at hospitals
Gov. Henry McMaster on Friday said he’s now happy with S.C. hospitals’ rollout of COVID-19 vaccines after spending the first part of the week criticizing the pace of inoculations.
McMaster, speaking during a brief news conference at Hilton Head Hospital, said he wasn’t initially satisfied with hospitals’ handling of the complex distribution process, but now thinks the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control and the state’s medical centers are “completely in sync” after a “lack of organization.”
“We’re past that now,” said the governor, who visited Hilton Head Hospital to watch its vaccination clinic. “The hospitals, this one being a prime example, are doing very, very well. … Those that are behind are catching up.”
McMaster’s tone was markedly different Friday compared to comments he made earlier this week.
While touring a vaccination site in Myrtle Beach on Tuesday, McMaster threatened to issue an executive order limiting elective surgeries if hospitals didn’t prioritize the mass vaccination campaign.
“We have got to use every single dose of this vaccine that comes into the state,” he said at the time.
He said the same thing Monday after touring Spartanburg Medical Center and Lexington Medical Center.
But by Friday, the governor said it was clear that hospitals had gotten the message. There was a statewide issue a week ago, McMaster said, but medical centers now understand they should use all first doses immediately instead of saving some of those for second shots, among other things.
DHEC on Sunday had issued new guidance to hospitals, writing that vaccine providers should aim to administer their weekly batch of first doses within days.
“That vaccine is being distributed and being put in the arms very quickly,” McMaster told reporters Friday. “There was bottlenecks at the beginning. … Right now things are moving very quickly.”
According to DHEC data current as of late Thursday, 94% of all Pfizer-BioNTech doses redistributed to smaller hospitals through a DHEC-run site have been administered.
Roughly 90% of second doses redistributed to those facilities have been used.
At bigger hospitals and health care facilities, which receive shipments directly from Pfizer, 71% of all first doses had been administered as of late Thursday.
Only 49% of second doses had been used.
The statewide utilization rate — for all Pfizer doses, both first and second shots, which totaled 274,950 doses as of Thursday — was 66%. (A week ago it was 64%.)
Instead of criticizing hospitals Friday, McMaster emphasized that the state’s weekly vaccine allocations are likely to remain flat in coming weeks. He said South Carolina gets about 120,000 doses per week, if including both first and second doses. DHEC has said the state receives roughly 63,000 first doses each week.
The governor on Friday added that the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed has told the state to expect a gradual increase in vaccine doses sometime in March.
That influx couldn’t come soon enough. Hospitals around the state faced a surge of demand this week, and some were forced to cancel vaccination appointments amid a shortfall in expected Pfizer doses.
DHEC last Friday told the S.C. Hospital Association that medical centers would get only 20-25% of the Pfizer doses they requested for first shots this week, even though state leaders had expanded Phase 1a eligibility to include thousands of residents 70 or older beginning last Wednesday.
Hospitals’ vaccine orders for this week had totaled four times the amount previously allocated to the state, DHEC wrote in Sunday guidance.
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 over 2,000 doses this week, nor would it receive near equal allocations in the weeks to come. Hilton Head Regional Healthcare canceled roughly 300 appointments scheduled for early this week.
“The vaccine’s coming, but it’s just ... it’s not enough,” McMaster said Friday.
This story was originally published January 22, 2021 at 5:33 PM.
