SC will begin getting 10,000 more weekly doses of COVID-19 vaccine starting next week
Starting next week, South Carolina will receive 10,000 more weekly first doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine than it has been getting to this point, state health officials said Wednesday.
The additional doses will bring the state’s weekly total of first doses to 72,600, a 16% increase from previous weekly allocations, interim public health director Brannon Traxler said.
Traxler said federal officials told the state Department of Health and Environmental Control to expect the state’s allotment of COVID-19 vaccine doses to remain consistent for the next three weeks. It wasn’t immediately clear how many doses South Carolina would receive in subsequent weeks.
“While modest in number, the small increase in the Moderna vaccine doses will help further our efforts to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible,” Traxler said. “However, it is important to remember that the demand for vaccines still exceeds the supply that South Carolina is receiving from the federal government.”
As of Wednesday, the state had received more than 622,000 total vaccine doses, according to DHEC data. Nearly 300,000 of those first and second doses have been administered to about 250,000 people.
Close to 1 million South Carolina residents comprise Phase 1a, the state’s initial vaccination phase, which includes health care workers, long-term care facility residents and staff, hospital inpatients 65 and older, and all people 70 and older.
DHEC does not currently anticipate moving to the next vaccination phase, which includes police officers, firefighters, teachers and public transit workers, until early spring.
That could change, however, if more vaccine starts flowing into the state or demand for vaccine dwindles.
“The more doses that are coming in the pipeline and into the state, especially sooner, that is going to help move up the phase timeline,” Traxler said Wednesday.
She said she supported any plan that gets more shots into the arms of South Carolinians, but wasn’t sure if the Biden administration’s goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by summer’s end was realistic. A lot will depend on increasing production of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and the speed with which other vaccines still in clinical trials are authorized for emergency use, Traxler said.
State health officials are still in the process of determining how best to allocate the additional vaccine doses South Carolina will receive in the coming weeks, but said the impact of the additional doses should be felt immediately.
With the state’s vaccine supply expected to meet only a fraction of the demand for the foreseeable future, DHEC has been working on an equitable model for distributing doses to counties.
DHEC’s governing board on Tuesday instructed health officials to begin planning to ration doses to counties on a per capita basis. The politically appointed board selected the population-based model over another plan that would have taken into consideration the age and various social factors of county residents.
Health officials are currently working out the finer points of the per capita distribution model and preparing vaccine providers to expect a shift in their weekly allocations in advance of the expected shift to the new model next month.
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 4:00 PM with the headline "SC will begin getting 10,000 more weekly doses of COVID-19 vaccine starting next week."