With vast swaths of the United States pelted by heavy winter storms that brought Covid-19 vaccinations to a near-halt over the past week, health officials say a daunting task has become even more difficult.
But not impossible.
“We’re going to just have to make up for it: namely do double-time when this thing clears up,” declared Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a top pandemic adviser to President Biden.
Jennifer Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the Biden administration was working closely with manufacturing and shipping partners to assess weather conditions, and would have more updates on delivery issues on Friday.
The brutal winter weather delayed the delivery of hundreds of thousands of doses across the country just as vaccine distribution was beginning to gather steam in the United States. Part of the problems is that the storms affected a FedEx facility in Memphis and a UPS facility in Louisville, Ky. — both vaccine shipping hubs.
Shipment delays have been reported in California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Utah and Washington, among other states, forcing vaccine sites to temporarily shutter and coveted appointments to be rescheduled.
In Texas, where millions of residents lost power during the powerful storm, a delivery of more than 400,000 first doses and 330,000 second doses was delayed. A portion of those shots, roughly 35,000 doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, were sent to North Texas providers on Wednesday, but shipments will continue to depend on safety conditions.
Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said on Thursday that the state was “asking providers that aren’t able to store vaccine due to power outages to transfer it elsewhere or administer it so it doesn’t spoil.”
On Monday, health officials in Texas scrambled to give people more than 5,000 doses after a power outage in a storage facility where they were being kept. But Mr. Van Deusen said that “reports of vaccine spoiling have been minimal.”
The Houston Health Department said on Thursday it would restart vaccinations for second doses this weekend and schedule additional first- and second-dose appointments next week. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said that more than 2,000 vaccine sites were in areas with power outages.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference that “a vast majority of the resupply” the city was expecting for this week had not yet shipped from the factories.
The city has had to hold off on scheduling upward of 35,000 appointments for first vaccine doses because of shipment delays and vaccine shortages. The opening of two new distribution sites was also postponed.
In Los Angeles, the city said that appointments for about 12,500 would be delayed.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said that while 136,000 Pfizer doses had arrived this week, the state had not received its shipment for the week of 200,000 Moderna doses. He said the shipment could be delayed as late as Monday.
“Because the storms we are seeing in the rest of the country, it’s basically sitting in the FedEx warehouse — and I don’t think they can even get into it because of everything,” Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference, encouraging those who had appointments rescheduled to “hang in there, the doses are going to get here.”
Dr. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, called the weather delay “significant.”
“Obviously it’s an issue,” he told MSNBC on Thursday. “It’s been slowed down in some places, going to a grinding halt.”
Dr. Fauci said, “We’re just going to have to make up for it as soon as the weather lifts a bit, the ice melts and we can get the trucks out and the people out.”
As of Thursday, the C.D.C. said that about 41 million people had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, including about 16.2 million people who have been fully vaccinated.
An international effort to speed up the manufacture and distribution of coronavirus vaccines around the globe got a boost Thursday on two fronts: White House officials said the Biden administration would make good on a U.S. promise to donate $4 billion to the campaign over the next two years and the pharmaceutical company Novavax committed to eventually sell 1.1 billion doses of its vaccine.
President Biden will make his announcement on Friday during a virtual meeting with other leaders from the Group of 7, where he is also expected to call on other countries to step up their contributions. The $4 billion was approved last year by a Republican-led Senate when President Donald J. Trump was still in office.
Public health experts often say that unless everyone is vaccinated, it is as if no one is vaccinated. One of the officials, who spoke anonymously to preview the president’s announcement, noted that the move to help with efforts abroad to diminish the impact of the pandemic was also in the interest of international security for the United States.
Countries such as India and China are already using the coronavirus vaccine as a diplomatic tool; both are giving away doses to other nations in an effort to expand their global influence. National security experts said the United States should consider doing the same.
But, an official said, the United States will not be able to share vaccines now, while the American vaccination campaign is still continuing to expand.
The international vaccine effort, known as Covax, has been led by the public-private health partnership known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, as well as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the World Health Organization. It aims to distribute vaccines that have been deemed safe and effective by the W.H.O., with a special emphasis on low- and middle-income countries.
So far, the United States has pledged more than any other nation, according to the White House. Officials there said the money would be delivered in multiple tranches: an initial donation of $500 million right away, followed shortly by an additional $1.5 billion. The remaining $2 billion will delivered by the end of 2022
The Novavax sale will not come immediately; its vaccine has not yet been approved by a government regulatory authority. [An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the company’s planned action as a donation, not a sale.]
Under a memorandum of understanding between Gavi and Novavax, the company agreed to provide “1.1 billion cumulative doses,” though it did not specify a time frame.
Mr. Biden was not the only G-7 member urging greater contribution to the global vaccination effort. President Emmanuel Macron of France said the United States and Europe should allocate up to 5 percent of their vaccine orders to developing countries.
“We are allowing the idea to take hold that hundreds of millions of vaccines are being given in rich countries and that we are not starting in poor countries,” Mr. Macron said in an interview with the Financial Times.
António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary General, also offered choice words for what he described as a “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of vaccines. In a high-level meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, Mr. Guterres called vaccine equity “the biggest moral test before the global community.”
He called on G-7 countries to “create the momentum to mobilize the necessary financial resources” at their Friday meeting.
BANGKOK — Once again, a Thailand hotel guest who posted complaints online faces the threat of a defamation charge. This time, it centers on the guest’s claim of cockroach legs in his macaroni.
Topp Dunyawit Phadungsaeng, who spent 14 days in coronavirus quarantine at the Ambassador City Jomtien Hotel after arriving last month from San Francisco, had plenty of time on his hands to record complaints about the quality of the food, the lack of cleanliness and the presence of bugs.
On Monday, after checking out, he posted on Facebook about his stay, including 46 photographs and four videos that he took of the hotel, a government-designated quarantine facility. His posts were widely shared, especially a photo of what he said were the legs of a cockroach in his stir-fried meal.
“It turned out to be the worst 14 days of my life,” he said in his post. “Don’t call this quarantine. A forced prison stay looks better than this.”
His complaints were widely picked up by the Thai news media. And a day after his post appeared, the hotel issued a statement calling on a “certain group of people” to stop posting “false information” with the intent of damaging the hotel’s reputation. Otherwise, the hotel said, it had the right to pursue civil and criminal charges “to the utmost.”
Because of the coronavirus, anyone coming to Thailand must spend 14 days in quarantine. The government will cover the cost of some hotels, including the Ambassador City Jomtien, which is near Pattaya city. Guests can pay to stay at higher-end hotels, including some with five stars, that are designated quarantine sites.
Mr. Topp said he regretted not paying for better lodging. Among his complaints were that his room had no Wi-Fi but plenty of mosquitoes and cockroaches. Water dripped from the ceiling, bedsheets were moldy, and he was served food that was sometimes inedible, he said.
“I didn’t expect it to be a luxury five-star hotel,” he wrote. “But have you ever been disappointed despite not having any expectations?”
In September, an American hotel guest was arrested and charged with criminal defamation after posting complaints on TripAdvisor about his stay at the Sea View Koh Chang resort on Koh Chang island.
The guest, Wesley Barnes, eventually made a formal apology in exchange for the hotel’s dropping the charges. But the Sea View’s strategy backfired. It was widely criticized on social media, and TripAdvisor posted a notice warning travelers that the hotel was behind the jailing of a guest for harsh reviews.
A spokesman for the defense ministry, which has a role in overseeing quarantine facilities, said he hoped Mr. Topp and the Ambassador City Jomtien Hotel resolve their difference.
“In this case, it is the right of the reviewer,” said the spokesman, Kongcheep Tantravanich, “but we would also ask for sympathy for the hotel owners.”
To get her coronavirus vaccination last weekend, Frances H. Goldman, 90, went to an extraordinary length: six miles. On foot.
It was too snowy to drive at 8 a.m. on Sunday when Ms. Goldman took out her hiking poles, dusted off her snow boots and started out from her home in the Seattle neighborhood of View Ridge. She made her way to the Burke-Gilman Trail on the edge of the city, where she then wended her way alongside a set of old railroad tracks, heading south. Then she traversed the residential streets of Laurelhurst to reach the Seattle Children’s Hospital.
It was a quiet walk, Ms. Goldman said. People were scarce. She caught glimpses of Lake Washington through falling snow. It would have been more difficult, she said, had she not gotten a bad hip replaced last year.
At the hospital, about three miles and an hour from home, she got the jab. Then she bundled up again and walked back the way she had come.
It was an extraordinary effort — but that was not the extent of it. Ms. Goldman, who became eligible for a vaccine last month, had already tried everything she could think of to secure an appointment. She had made repeated phone calls and fruitless visits to the websites of local pharmacies, hospitals and government health departments. She enlisted a daughter in New York and a friend in Arizona to help her find an appointment.
Finally, on Friday, a visit to the Seattle Children’s Hospital website yielded results.
“Lo and behold, a whole list of times popped up,” she said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. I went and got my glasses to make sure I was seeing it right.”
Then came the snow, which would ultimately drop more than 10 inches, in one of Seattle’s snowiest weekends on record. Wary of driving on hilly, unplowed roads, Ms. Goldman decided to go to the hospital on foot. She took a test walk part of the way on Saturday to get a sense of how long the trip might take.
And on Sunday, she trekked all the way to the hospital to get her vaccine.
“I hope that it will inspire people to get their shots,” she said. “I think it’s important for the whole country.”
The rollout in Washington State, like many around the country, has been complicated by failures of technology, shortfalls in equity and a persistent imbalance of supply and demand. State officials have struggled to set up the infrastructure necessary to schedule and vaccinate the millions of people who are already eligible.
Ms. Goldman is scheduled to receive her second dose of the vaccine next month. She plans to drive.
Israel has raced ahead with the fastest Covid-19 vaccination campaign in the world, inoculating nearly half its population with at least one dose. Now its success is making it a case study in setting rules for a partially vaccinated society — raising thorny questions about rights, obligations and the greater good.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted this week to open shopping malls and museums to the public, subject to social distancing rules and mandatory masking. For the first time in many months, gyms, cultural and sports events, hotels and swimming pools will also reopen, but only for some.
Under a new “Green Badge” system that functions as both a carrot and a stick, the government is making leisure activities accessible only to people who are fully vaccinated or recovered starting from Sunday. Two weeks later, restaurants, event halls and conferences will be allowed to operate under those rules. Customers and attendees will have to carry a certificate of vaccination with a QR code.
Israel is one of the first countries grappling in real time with a host of legal, moral and ethical questions as it tries to balance the steps toward resuming public life with sensitive issues such as public safety, discrimination, free choice and privacy.
“Getting vaccinated is a moral duty. It is part of our mutual responsibility,” said the health minister, Yuli Edelstein. He also has a new mantra: “Whoever does not get vaccinated will be left behind.”
Four million Israelis — nearly half the population of nine million — have received at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine, and more than 2.6 million have gotten a second dose. But about two million eligible citizens aged 16 or over have not sought vaccines. The average number of new daily infections is hovering around 4,000.
Israel’s central government — eager to bring the country out of its third national lockdown without setting off a new wave of infections — was spurred into action by local initiatives. Chafing under the country’s lockdown regulations, an indoor shopping mall in the working-class Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam threw its doors open last week for customers who could prove that they had been vaccinated or had recovered from Covid-19.
In Karmiel, the mayor made a similar decision to open his city in the northern Galilee region for business. Other mayors want to bar unvaccinated teachers from classrooms while some hoteliers threatened unvaccinated employees with dismissal.
Mr. Edelstein, the health minister, said on Thursday that vaccination would not be compulsory in Israel. But his ministry is now proposing legislation that would oblige unvaccinated employees whose work involves contact with the public to be tested for the virus every two days. And he is promoting a bill that would allow the ministry to identify unvaccinated people to the local authorities.