More pharmacies, grocers may begin offering COVID-19 vaccine in Virginia next week

Virginians seeking COVID-19 vaccinations will have a number of new options as soon as next week, state vaccination coordinator Danny Avula said Friday afternoon.

At least eight national and regional pharmacy and grocery store chains – including Walgreens, Kroger, Walmart and Food Lion in the Richmond region – as well as a number of independent pharmacies statewide will begin receiving vaccine directly from the federal government, Avula told reporters during a conference call. In other regions of the state, Safeway, Martin's, Harris Teeter and Giant also will be offering doses.

In total, those stores and their more than 100 participating locations will share 26,000 doses, he said. CVS, which began offering vaccinations at 36 locations statewide earlier this month, will continue to receive 26,000 weekly doses as well for use at its pharmacies, Avula said.

Additionally, a number of community health centers statewide also will begin receiving doses of vaccine next week directly from the federal government, as part of an expanding effort to reach all 1,300 such centers nationally.

And separately, the state will begin receiving 161,000 total doses next week – up from the 130,000 weekly doses it has been receiving recently, he said.

Those weekly doses have been split fairly evenly between the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine, but this week, winter weather caused about 106,000 doses of the latter not to make it to the state in time for us, he said. That quantity included more than 70,000 first doses and about 35,000 second doses, Avula said, meaning that local health districts statewide this week only were able to administer about 60,000 first doses.

That means that next week should be a busy one statewide, with more than 231,000 first doses being administered.

The new doses coming to the new grocery and pharmacy partners statewide next week all will be the Pfizer vaccine, according to Avula, who said that state officials had only four hours Thursday to determine which stores would be receiving the new doses.

When CVS launched its vaccination effort statewide, it was unable to integrate the existing pre-registration lists that local health districts in the state had compiled, causing frustration for some of those on the lists and for state officials, who had hoped such a plan would be possible.

This time, Avula said, officials do expect that the new participating locations will be able simply to receive names from the state’s list and offer vaccines first to those who have been prioritized by the state.

Though it’s likely that most or all of the new locations begin administering vaccine late next week, Avula said he wasn’t yet certain that that would be the case.

The wait for those in Phase 1C could be 2 months or more

Virginia this week launched its new statewide pre-registration system, and in so doing also combined and cleaned all existing lists from local health districts (except the Fairfax County Health District). The initial combination of lists resulted in 1.6 million names, Avula said, but there were 400,000 duplicates.

It likely will take until mid-April for all Virginians who are eligible in Phase 1B of the state’s vaccination standards to receive their initial doses, according to Avula.

“Everyone who is in [Phase] 1C should very much be planning on months and not weeks” before they become eligible for vaccination, he said.

With variant strains of COVID-19 becoming more prevalent worldwide and a version from the United Kingdom expected to become the dominant one in the United States by sometime next month, health officials want to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible to slow the spread of those new types.

A report Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine by Canadian researchers concluded that just one dose of the Pfizer vaccine or one dose of the modern vaccine may actually prove to be 92% effective in protecting people from the virus. The study suggested that in an effort to get doses into the arms of as many people as possible, health officials consider using all available doses immediately, rather than saving second doses that may offer only slight additional protection in the short term.

On Friday, Avula said that state officials most likely would continue with their current approach and that he wouldn’t expect that to change unless the Food and Drug Administration or Centers for Disease Control adjusted their direction to states about how and when to administer doses.

He also suggested that while the state likely would continue allocating doses next week to local health districts based largely upon a ratio of the population served by each one, the allocation method could change a bit as soon as the following week in order to try to reach more at-risk people.

State officials, for example, held back 10,000 doses to target for use among Blacks (particularly elderly Blacks) statewide this week, he said, and similar efforts to reach other minorities or seniors could result in adjusted totals by health district.