TRENTON, NJ – New Jersey’s vaccination effort has been delayed as vaccines have become scarce and appointments to receive vaccines even scarcer. Most sites in New Jersey have delays and some are even telling people to try again in the spring.
“Listen, with all due respect to the premise of the question, do you take any responsibility? This isn’t a blame game,” Murphy said. “We’re calling the facts as we see them. We’ve built a distribution system with 270 points and that number is going to grow. We talked about, at some point sooner than later, houses of worship, we talked about CVS, Rite Aid with points. We said we’re going to build that out ahead of any certainty on the supply.”
Murphy said the supply line from the Trump administration was lower than what was promised and said the Biden administration is trying to recover from that shortage.
“The supply is less than what we were promised and indicated in early December. It is what it is. The Biden team is making great progress to backfill on that. The long-term care piece of this was not acceptable. I don’t know how else to put that,” Murphy said.
Murphy also acknowledged technical issues with the state’s vaccination pre-registration system.
“We’ve had vendor issues with the preregistration and the ability for folks to preregister online. We’ve worked aggressively with the main principle vendor and it’s gotten better,” he said. “Nobody is blameless here. This has never been done in the history of the United States of America. By definition, you’re not batting 1,000. I would just say to the millions of folks out there who have had extraordinary patience, we thank you. Please keep it up.”