FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
Refrigerated boxes of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the Seminole County Vaccine Point of Dispensing Site in Florida, before its opening, on Monday, Dec. 28, 2020. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)
Covid-19 vaccines sit at hospitals as doctors, pharmacies await doses
WASHINGTON — Stephen Nuckolls, who runs a North Carolina health care medical group called Coastal Carolina Health Care, has deep freezers capable of storing the two authorized Covid-19 vaccines and hundreds of staff ready to give it. But after two weeks of emailing the North Carolina health department, he couldn’t get a supply.
“My medical practice and many others have mostly completed our annual flu shot clinics and have staff and freezers (yes -70c) standing by to administer the shots,” he wrote in a Dec. 23 email to the Medical Group Management Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group representing independent practices. “But despite our repeated emails to the [North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services] we have no vaccine and there appears to be no plan to send any in the near future.”