More than two thirds of the 15 million coronavirus vaccines shipped within the US have gone unused, health officials said on Monday.
The governors of New York and Florida vowed to penalise hospitals that failed to dispense the shots quickly.
In New York, hospitals must administer the drugs within a week of receiving them or face a fine and a reduction in future supplies, Governor Andrew Cuomo said.
Hours later, he announced the state’s first known case of a new, more infectious coronavirus variant originally found in Britain.
"I don't want the vaccine in a fridge or a freezer, I want it in somebody's arm. If you're not performing this function, it does raise questions about the operating efficiency of the hospital," he said.
New York hospitals on the whole have dispensed less than half of their allocated doses to date, but performance varied from one healthcare group to another, Mr Cuomo said.
The NYC Health + Hospitals system, the city's main public hospital network, administered only 31 per cent of its allotment, compared with 99 per cent for a few private hospitals in the state.
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported an even lower vaccine uptake for New York overall, saying fewer than one in five of the 896,000 doses shipped to the state since mid-December had been used.
In Florida, where officials have put senior citizens before many essential workers for getting the vaccine, Governor Ron DeSantis said the state would allocate more doses to the hospitals that dispense them quickly.
“Hospitals that do not do a good job of getting the vaccine out will have their allocations transferred to hospitals that are doing a good job at getting the vaccine out,” Mr DeSantis said.
“We do not want vaccine to just be idle at some hospital system,” he said.
Florida, which has dispensed fewer than a quarter of the 1.14 million doses it received, according to the CDC, will send 1,000 more nurses to administer vaccines.
It will also keep state-run immunisation clinics open seven days a week, Mr DeSantis said.
UK variant found in New York
Mr Cuomo’s announcement that the more contagious Covid-19 variant known as B.1.1.7 had been confirmed gave new urgency to the state’s efforts to accelerate vaccinations.
A man in his sixties living in a town north of Albany was confirmed to have the variant, and at least three other US cases have been documented since last week, one each in Florida, California and Colorado. None of the four patients had travelled recently, meaning the variant was probably spreading from person to person in the areas it was found in.
Neither the British variant nor a similarly contagious strain found in South Africa is believed any more lethal than the more common form of the virus. Scientists say newly developed vaccines should be equally effective against all three. But medical experts worry that the emergence of a more communicable variant could accelerate a months-long surge of infections and hospital admissions, which have already strained US health care to its limits.
America’s death toll exceeds 360,000 and it has more than 21 million known infections, with the fatality rate averaging 2,600 lives every 24 hours in the past week.
The staggering human toll, together with an upending of daily social life and a stifling of economic activity, has made the slower than expected uptake of available vaccines all the more vexing to authorities.
‘Must do better’
Medics have confronted widespread distrust of immunisation safety, even among some healthcare workers, owing in part to the record speed with which Covid-19 vaccines were developed and approved 11 months after the virus emerged in North America.
But some US officials have cited organisational glitches in launching the most ambitious mass inoculation campaign in the nation’s history, which coincided with the winter holiday season.
"The logistics of getting it going into the people who want it is really the issue. We're not where we want to be, no doubt about that. I don't think we can blame it all on vaccine hesitancy," US infectious disease specialist Dr Anthony Fauci told MSNBC.
Only about 4.5 million doses of vaccine have been administered, the CDC said.
That figure means the federal government was well short of its goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020, although officials said they expected the number to increase significantly this month.
“We have got to do better, and we are going to keep doing better," US surgeon general Jerome Adams told CBS News.
He said he expected major improvements in the next two weeks.
