Note: Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! I’m taking a break from the daily Q&A from 12/24 through 1/3.  If you have a question, go ahead and send it and  I’ll aim to respond when I resume posts in the new year. Take care, everyone!

Question: When can we expect the vaccine priority Phase 1b group to begin to get immunized? 

Answer:  Likely by late-January.  Yesterday, CDC released The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ Updated Interim Recommendation for Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccine, which confirms that “In Phase 1b, COVID-19 vaccine should be offered to persons aged ≥75 years and non–health care frontline essential workers, and in Phase 1c, to persons aged 65–74 years, persons aged 16–64 years with high-risk medical conditions, and essential workers not included in Phase 1b.”  It also offers a helpful table on how many people are in each category (Table 1).  As you’ll see, 24 million health care personnel and long-term care facility residents are in Phase 1a.  

There’s no set date for when we move to Phase 1b.  And as of yesterday, according to Bloomberg News, 777,766 doses had been administered since the initial roll-out on 14 December. The daily number vaccinated is increasing with increased distribution, especially thanks to the Moderna vaccine authorization/roll out.  According to data from CDC, Operation Warp Speed allocated enough Pfizer vaccination doses as of 12/23 to cover 7.658 million people (1st and 2nd doses) and enough Moderna vaccination doses to cover 7.995 million people (1st and 2nd doses).  If things continue at this pace, we would expect to have enough Pfizer and Moderna doses allocated to cover the full 24 million Phase 1a population by early January.  Add to that the time to get the vaccines to administration sites plus the time to get the vaccines administered and we’re probably looking at Phase 1b starting in late-January across most of the country.  Indeed, this is what New York State’s Governor Cuomo described as its expected timeline (note: in NYS, Phase 1b is called Phase 2).

Table 1. Prioritized Vaccine Group Population Size (millions) (from CDC)