Q&A of the Day – Is Florida receiving its fair share of vaccines?
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
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Today’s entry: Is Biden in line with Trump’s 1M administered covid vaccines/day? What are the stats? Also. My understanding is fewer vaccines are being distributed to FL by Biden on a weekly basis as compared to Trump.
Bottom Line: Just over a week ago I covered Florida’s sharp drop in vaccines under the Biden administration on a relative and absolute basis. That included a 29% decline in the total number of weekly vaccines received within Florida under the Biden administration. Additionally, Florida’s share of vaccines fell from 6.9% under the Trump administration to a woeful 2.4% under the Biden administration. Florida has 6.7% of the county’s population. What’s more, based on demographics, Florida’s population is the most vulnerable to COVID-19 in the country. Since my reporting I’ve consistently received questions like today’s note. Given the seriousness of the situation it’s worth an update. First, regarding the question of the total number of vaccinations per day.
Regarding your first question, yes, even with the weather-related disruptions impacting vaccination programs throughout the country – more than 1 million vaccinations per day took place last week. 1.28 million to be exact. We’ve been at the 1 million plus daily goal since the week of January 17th, the week of the transfer of power between the Trump and Biden administrations. In total 65 million vaccinations have taken place nationally. To answer your second question, I’m going to use what’s been allocated for vaccine shipments for the week of March 1st so we don’t have storm related outliers skewing the data.
According to the CDC’s tracker, Florida’s set to receive 479,700 first and second dose vaccines next week. That compares to 8,503,560 total doses set to ship nationally next week equaling 5.6% of the national vaccine supply. That’s a vast improvement over the 2.4% of a couple of weeks ago but still inexplicably trails Florida’s relative population. Next week’s population adjusted supply is still 18% lower than it should be. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been addressed by the Biden administration and I’m not expecting they’ll answer my requests for an explanation either – though that’d be a pleasant surprise. I’ll continue to stay with this story.
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