California’s next COVID vaccine shipment will be far smaller than expected, Gov. Newsom says

California’s next shipment of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine will be about 40% smaller than expected, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said Thursday.

Newsom had said Tuesday that California expected to receive 393,000 vaccine doses in the a shipment early next week. But the federal government has since told California to expect just 233,000 doses, Newsom spokeswoman Erin Mellon said.

“The numbers we provided for future shipments were projected estimates based on what the federal government had communicated to us,” Mellon wrote in an email to The Sacramento Bee. “The federal government delayed the number of Pfizer vaccines that California will receive in the next shipment – many states received new estimated shipment amounts.”

Officials in other states, including Washington State, Florida, Missouri and Kansas, also confirmed they have been told by the federal government to expect fewer vaccine doses next week than they anticipated. Those public health officials said they did not receive an explanation.

Trump administration officials with Operation Warp Speed, the federal program overseeing vaccine development and distribution, rejected the notion that the new numbers amount to cuts.

“No allocations have been cut,” said Michael Bars, a White House spokesman. “This is inaccurate.”

The reason for the confusion, according to a federal official familiar with the matter, is that a Defense Department system called Tiberius set up to track and model the distribution of coronavirus vaccines kept outdated practice numbers in place throughout last week and failed to update with accurate information.

“Tiberius has been online for a couple of months, and it’s where a lot of the exercise and planning modules were where they could see potential allocations,” said a federal official familiar with the matter. “The problem is that they kept those exercising and planning modules in there, and that’s what people were looking at as late as last week.”

As state government officials went in to order additional doses in recent days – through a separate program called VTrckS, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – they discovered that the actual doses they would be receiving were far lower.

Newsom said this week that California anticipated receiving up to 2.1 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine this year, from both Pfizer and Moderna, another pharmaceutical company that developed a vaccine.

An expert advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration recommended Moderna’s vaccine during a Thursday meeting, which means the company might begin distributing its first supply in the coming days.

On Monday, the state began vaccinating health care workers at risk of COVID-19 exposure after it received the initial round of vaccine doses from Pfizer, 327,000 in total. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine are designed to be administered to each person in two doses, the second dose about three weeks after the first.

In a statement, Pfizer denied having “any production issues” with its COVID-19 vaccine, and said “no shipments containing the vaccine are on hold or delayed.”

The company said it also had successfully shipped out this week its first 2.9 million doses across the country.

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

Pfizer added it remained “confident” it could deliver a promised 50 million doses across the globe by the end of 2020, and another 1.3 billion in 2021.

In Sacramento County, health officials said they have been told the number of vaccines they will receive next week will “fluctuate due to limited amounts.”

UC Davis Medical Center officials in Sacramento on Thursday said the 4,875 doses they received on Tuesday were about the amount they had expected. They had inoculated 1,000 hospital employees as of Thursday, and expect to have administered all of the initial 4,875 doses in about a week.

Based on Thursday’s news of reduced distribution numbers, UC Davis officials said they are checking to verify how many doses they may receive in an expected second shipment in the coming weeks.

Officials in El Dorado and Yolo counties said they both received shipments of 975 doses each, the number they were expecting.

“We got what we were supposed to get,” said Yolo County spokeswoman Jenny Tan. “We are expecting another shipment of vaccines next week. Not a sure date yet.”

She said the county does not yet know how many doses it is slated to get in the next round.

The vials are being stored at an undisclosed location for safety purposes, Tan said. The first 975 doses will be administered, starting Friday, to critical care workers at Sutter Davis and Woodland Memorial hospitals.

This story was originally published December 17, 2020 at 2:33 PM with the headline "California’s next COVID vaccine shipment will be far smaller than expected, Gov. Newsom says."