States are negotiating to get their shares of any coronavirus vaccine that may be distributed, once one or more are authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration, Illinois’ state health officer told CNN Wednesday.
Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said she asked for 400,000 doses of vaccine from the federal government but has been told they will get fewer.
“We have had a readjustment of the numbers that were quoted to us and I have talked to other state health officials – all of them have a proportional decrease in their counts,” Ezike told CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson on “Inside Politics.”
“We are still waiting to see answers, and understand maybe why that is, but it seems that the initial allotment we thought would be ready to go out – that number has decreased. So as a result, all the states are going to get a smaller amount.”
The FDA has yet to authorize any vaccine but has scheduled a meeting for Dec. 10 for its advisers to consider Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine. Federal officials have said they would start rolling out vaccine within 24 hours of emergency use authorization, and predict they would have 40 million doses ready for the country in December.
In the meantime, hospitals are filling up and staffing is short, Ezike said.
“We have hospitals reaching out, saying that they have had large number of staff that are either infected themselves or on quarantine,” she said.
“There are numbers of individuals in the emergency room that are waiting to get a bed to be transferred for the continuation of care. So we are starting to see that. So we really need to stop the number of infections on the front end so that we can give a break to our amazing hospital workers who did this in the first wave and are starting this again.”
She hopes people stay home Thursday for Thanksgiving.
“I’m still making the urgent plea imploring people to reconsider their plans. If they were planning a larger gathering, if they were planning plan on mixing households, mixing extended family, people who are not already within your home, we don’t want to infect the ones we love,” Ezike said.
“We want to protect the ones we love and we can do that by sacrificing the way we do Thanksgiving. We’re not cancelling Thanksgiving but we do need to transform it into something that respects what Covid can do and has done, and not make this Thanksgiving holiday one that we will regret in years to come because of what happened at this day of Thanksgiving.”
