With current supply, RI will likely not meet goal of making all adults eligible for vaccine by May 1

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WLNE) – The Rhode Island COVID-19 Vaccine Subcommittee met Tuesday morning, sharing details of the state’s vaccination rollout and timeline.

It was said that weekly the state is currently getting about 15,000 first doses of Pfizer’s vaccine and about 13,000 second doses, and 10,800 first doses of Moderna’s vaccine and 10,800 second doses.

As for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the state received an initial shipment of 9,100 doses weeks ago and is expecting 1,300 additional doses to arrive this week.

“We don’t have a forecast of what our steady state allocation will be, and we’re not sure we’ll see that for another few weeks.”

It’s that unsureness of how much vaccine the state will be getting in the coming weeks that makes it hard to know if Rhode Island will meet President Joe Biden’s goal of making all adults eligible for a vaccine by May 1.

Alysia Mihalakos, chief of RIDOH’s Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response said the state has the capacity to administer more vaccines, but the supply isn’t coming in.

“(The timeline) does not reflect the President’s announcement that says where we expect to be by the first of May. This slide is under heavy discussion at this point in time about how we appropriately shift it so that we can properly open vaccine by May 1st per the President’s recommendation.”

“We do not anticipate that we would have enough vaccine in order to get to that particular mandate, but surprises happen and we would love to be pleasantly surprised,” said Mihalakos.

In an emailed statement, spokesperson for RIDOH, Joseph Wendelken, said the state is “100% confident that we can meet President Biden’s target, if we start getting enough vaccine. We have the capacity now to administer 100,000 doses a week.”

He went on to explain that the vaccine subcommittee was referencing what RIDOH has in writing, which is how much vaccine is coming into the state in the next three weeks.

“However, we have every expectation that our vaccine supply will increase beyond that. For example, we are getting roughly 50,000 doses a week now. We expect to start getting close to 16,000 doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine by the end of the month, and those are doses to get people fully immunized. Allocations of Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are forecasted to increase by almost 100% by June.

“For those reasons, we are very hopeful that we’ll get to that May 1st goal the President set out. We have built out our infrastructure very significantly. We absolutely have the capacity to meet that target. It’s just a matter of supply.”

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