PA Expediting Vaccine Timeline; All Eligible By April 19

PENNSYLVANIA — Pennsylvania announced an accelerated vaccination timeline on Wednesday, saying that doses will become available to the general public by April 19.

The state plans to swiftly move through several phases in the coming weeks, with several individuals in the 1B category becoming eligible on March 31, as previously announced.

The rest of 1B will be eligible on April 5, and 1C will be eligible on April 12, officials said.

"We've been able to tell our providers that we are going to get at least this floor of vaccine week after week,"Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam said. "You can rely on that, you can schedule on that. Previously we were in a world where that predictability didn't exist."

Because providers can not reliably schedule into the future, the state was able to open up eligibility to more residents. Even though the vaccine will be available to the public by April 19, it could still be some time before an actual appointment becomes available, officials warn.

Beam pointed to increased allotments of doses from the federal government, as well as the increased efficiency of providers, who she said are now administering about 83,000 doses a day.

"The president has dramatically increased supply," State Sen. Art Haywood, a member of the COVID-19 bipartisan legislative task force which recommends policy, said during a news briefing Wednesday. "April and May will be nothing like February and March."

Moreover, Haywood said, counties in the southeast specifically will be receiving increased supply. The 42,000 Johnson & Johnson doses received this week, originally intended for state-run mass vaccine clinics that were fought against by the southeast, will instead be allocated directly to counties, as they asked. This comes after weeks of leaders in the southeast saying they were being shortchanged on doses, and that they had unused capacity to administer more doses.

"The increased supply to the southeast is a huge part of this," Haywood said.

In some parts of the state, tens of thousands of individuals still remain in 1A, and in the southeast, there have been serious concerns that the state would move into new phases before completing 1A. However, Beam was confident Wednesday that the state is "very close to completing 1A."

Beam added that vaccine providers, including in the most populated parts of the state in the southeast and southwest, have told the state that they're ready to move to the next phase of eligibility.

Even though eligibility for all groups will soon be available, that does not mean an appointment will be immediately available, officials warn. That could still take some time, and need to be scheduled into the future.

The state has improved its standing in the nation in vaccine administration, rising to 12th overall in first dose administration after sitting at the bottom of the rankings for several months.

Here is the schedule for who will be eligible in the remaining phases.

March 31: Police officers, firefighters, grocery store workers, and food and agriculture workers. Roughly 190,000 to 250,000 individuals are in this group.

April 5: The rest of the frontline workers in 1B. 700,000 to 1 million individuals are here.

April 12 will see 1C become eligible, include other critical infrastructure employees who cannot work remotely. 1.3 to 1.7 million are in this group.

April 19: The general public.

For full information about getting a coronavirus vaccine in Pennsylvania, visit Patch's information hub.