US roll-out of Moderna vaccine begins

NEW YORK • US distribution of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine has begun, with more than 3,700 sites due to start receiving and administering shots as soon as today, vastly widening the roll-out started last week by Pfizer.

Amid record coronavirus infections and deaths, Moderna has already moved vaccine supplies from its manufacturing plants to warehouses.

Trucks carrying containers packed with the vaccines set out yesterday and shipments will start reaching healthcare providers as soon as today, said General Gustave Perna of the US Army.

The vaccine must travel with security guards, including US Marshals, and will be stored in locked refrigerators. US plans call for at-risk groups such as elderly people in nursing homes and medical workers to receive injections first.

The Food and Drug Administration last Friday approved an emergency-use authorisation for Moderna's vaccine, the second Covid-19 vaccine to receive approval.

Moderna said a panel of outside advisers to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) voted on Saturday to recommend its vaccine for use in people aged at least 18. The Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices panel voted 11-0 in favour of the vaccine.

The jab developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech was authorised on Dec 11.

Pharmaceutical services provider Catalent's facility in Indiana is filling and packaging vials with Moderna vaccine and handing them to distributor McKesson Corp.

The firm is shipping them from its facilities, including those in Louisville, Kentucky; and Memphis, Tennessee, which are close to air hubs for UPS and FedEx.

Pfizer organised its own distribution system.

A spokesman for the US Department of Health and Human Services said 7.9 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would be delivered nationally this week.

The Moderna delivery system will have some of the same players as Pfizer's but will differ in key ways.

UPS and FedEx are giving priority to vaccines on planes and trucks that are moving holiday gifts and other cargo. Their drivers will handle the bulk of the last-mile Moderna vaccine deliveries, which are going directly to vaccination sites, unlike Pfizer's vaccine, which was sent to large hubs and redistributed.

"We added a lot of aircraft, a lot of temporary workers. (Vaccines) are a very small fraction of total volumes," said Mr Wes Wheeler, a UPS executive in charge of vaccine shipments.

Moderna's vaccine is available in quantities as small as 100 doses and can be stored for 30 days in standard-temperature refrigerators, while the inoculations from Pfizer come in boxes of 975 doses, must be shipped and stored at minus 70 deg C, and can be held for only five days at standard refrigerator temperatures.

Initial doses were given to health professionals. Programmes by pharmacies Walgreens and CVS to distribute the Pfizer vaccine to long-term care facilities are due to start today.

The CDC advisory panel was yesterday set to consider which groups should get vaccinated next.

Gen Perna said the United States is on track to have enough doses of vaccines by the end of the year to inoculate 20 million people, but deliveries of those doses may continue into the first week of next month.

Both vaccines were about 95 per cent effective at preventing illness in clinical trials that found no serious safety issues.

REUTERS