COLUMBIA, S.C. — The state health agency says the biggest issue with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout continues to be supply vs. demand, but now the federal government is giving the Palmetto State a 16% increase in the number of doses received starting next week.
"That's 10,000 more first doses a week that are going to be going into the arms of South Carolinians beginning next week," Dr. Brennan Traxler said.
Dr. Traxler, DHEC's Interim Director of Public Health, said every dose counts. She said starting next week the increase will make an impact.
"That takes us from 62,600 first doses received this week to an increase total of 72,600 first doses that we should receive next week, which includes 41,400 doses next week of the Moderna vaccines," Traxler said. "And to put that number a little more into perspective, this week we received 31,400 first doses from Moderna from the federal government."
As of January 27, Traxler said South Carolina has received 622,350 doses of vaccine, and that includes 341,250 doses of Pfizer and 281,100 doses of Moderna, and 297,453 doses of the vaccine have been administered.
"While modest in number the small increase in the Moderna vaccine doses will help further our efforts to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible," Traxler said.
As far as where the increase in doses will be allocated to, Traxler said they are still working on it.
"We are still reviewing the request from this week that we're submitted yesterday and we're also going to be working with our partners in this whole vaccination effort to determine the allocations of these additional 10,000 doses," Traxler said.
Traxler said even with the increase there is still struggles with the rollout.
"The biggest challenge has been and continues to be the limited doses of vaccines that are available to the state," Traxler said.
DHEC said while the increase in vaccine doses is coming the number of their Pfizer doses is not expect to change at this time.