Administration does not grant Michigan's request for additional vaccines to counter coronavisus surge

Biden officials won’t surge vaccine supply to Michigan, despite Covid spike Experts say the Biden administration should surge additional vaccine doses to Michigan. So far, the White House hasn’t listened. Lev Facher STAT

WASHINGTON — Amid Michigan’s worst-in-the-nation coronavirus surge, scientists and public health officials are urging the Biden administration to flood the state with additional vaccine doses.

So far, though, their plea has fallen on deaf ears. Instead, the federal government is sticking to a vaccine-allocation strategy that largely awards doses to states and territories based on their population. As a result, most jurisdictions are still receiving similar per-capita vaccine supplies, regardless of how many people there are getting sick — or how many excess vaccine doses they have. 

Experts have cast a surge in Michigan’s vaccine supply as a critical tool in combating the state’s most recent Covid-19 crisis. The state is currently recording nearly 7,000 new cases per day, just shy of its all-time peak in December. Hospitalizations and deaths, which tend to lag a few weeks behind increasing case counts, are also on the rise. 

During a media briefing on Wednesday, White House officials acknowledged that Michigan’s situation is dire. They gave no indication, though, that they would send additional vaccines there to help quell the surge, when STAT asked. They argued that it is too early in the national vaccine campaign to begin targeting supply based on case rates. 

Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the agency was working to expand testing capacity in the state, address outbreaks in Michigan’s jails and prisons, and scale up genomic sequencing. The one strategy she did not bring up was scaling up vaccine supply. 

“By and large, we are still allocating vaccines based upon population,” Andy Slavitt, one of President Biden’s top pandemic-response advisers, said during the briefing. “Clearly we will get to a place where more targeted strategies will work, but right now I would commit to you that we’re doing both.”  ...