On Monday, Governor Ron DeSantis updated Floridan’s on vaccination rates for those 65+ and possible shortages moving forward.
DeSantis said that Florida received 1.7 million first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and has distributed those first doses to 1,224,188 people.
“If we can get 500,000 a week, instead of just 266,000, we’re gonna be able to vaccinate that many more seniors that much more quickly,” DeSantis said. “We’re at the mercy of what the federal government sends us.”
“When you look at it from the perspective of the first doses, we’ve done a very high percentage of them, and we continue to go even higher,” said DeSantis.
At a briefing Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “I will note because we’re data first, facts first here, they’ve only distributed about 50% of the vaccines that they have been given in Florida,” Psaki said.
“So clearly, they have a good deal of the vaccine. That supply will need to continue to increase as they are able to effectively reach people across the state. But part of the challenge as we were just talking about, is not just having the supply, that’s pivotal, but also having vaccinators and having vaccine distribution places,” said Psaki Monday.
DeSantis said, “We don’t have a big cache sitting around at the state. We only get what they send us. The sole focus for the federal government should be increasing the number of doses available for the states,”
“We were told weeks ago that we would start to see increases now and we haven’t seen it, we have been very stagnant this whole month, ” he added.
DeSantis recognized that the state does have some unused doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, which are mostly second doses that have yet to be administered to those 65+.
DeSantis urges federal government to send more doses to Florida in addition to the 266,000 weekly doses delivered.
The full White House Briefing can be viewed here: