Most US vaccines remaining unused !
After approving two vaccine on the country , the executive committee arranged vaccination countrywide. After two weeks of inaguration, More than two-thirds of the 15 million coronavirus vaccines shipped within the United States have gone unused, US health officials said on Monday, as the governors of New York and Florida vowed to penalise hospitals that fail to dispense shots quickly.
In New York, hospitals must administer vaccines within a week of receiving them or face a fine and a reduction in future supplies, Governor Andrew Cuomo said, hours before announcing the state’s first known case of a new, more infectious coronavirus variant originally detected in Britain, reports Reuters.
“I don’t want the vaccine in a fridge or a freezer, I want it in somebody’s arm,” the governor said. “If you’re not performing this function, it does raise questions about the operating efficiency of the hospital.”
New York hospitals on the whole have dispensed fewer than half of their allocated doses to date, but performance varied from one group of hospitals to another, Cuomo said. The NYC Health + Hospitals system, the city’s main public hospital network, has only administered 31% of its allotment, compared with 99% for a few private hospitals in the state.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported an even lower vaccine uptake for New York overall, saying fewer than one in five of the 896,000 doses shipped to the state since mid-December have been given.
In Florida, where officials have put senior citizens ahead of many essential workers for getting the vaccine, Governor Ron DeSantis announced a policy under which the state would allocate more doses to hospitals that dispense them most quickly.
