Demand for COVID-19 vaccinations has fallen so dramatically in Georgia that the state has been turning down millions of allocated doses, telling the federal government to distribute them elsewhere.
The state has “donated”more than three million of its allotted doses of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines over the past three weeks, the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) said Thursday. Of that total, DPH turned down 788,210 on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Georgia has tens of thousands of doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on hand that are in danger of expiring before they can be injected into arms. DPH spokeswoman Nancy Nydam said Wednesday that about 171,500 un-administered J&J vaccines were scheduled to expire before the end of June.
On Thursday, though, amid warnings that supplies across the nation would expire, Johnson & Johnson announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has extended the vaccine’s expiration date by six weeks, based on data from ongoing studies. States have been so slow to use them that the federal government has stopped sending new shipments of J&J vaccines to states, an apparent effort to clear up backlogs.