TRENTON, NJ – As the administration of President Joe Biden continues to find its footing with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy today announced New Jersey has passed the one million dose mark.
Overall, 224,237 people in New Jersey have had both required vaccination shots and another 600,000 have had their first.
“This morning we are proud to announce that we have now exceeded more than 1 million COVID vaccination doses statewide. Our dashboard shows that number administered as of midmorning, and that breaks down to 813,216 initial doses and 224,237 second shots,” Governor Murphy said. “When we administered our first vaccine on December 15th, it took us 29 days to get to a quarter-of-a-million administered. It then took another 10 days for us to get to 500,000. It’s only taken us 16 days to go from 500,000 to 1 million. Even with the continued scarcity in supply and the rescheduling caused by snowstorms, we have put 500,000 vaccine doses in arms in just a little over two weeks.”
Murphy said that despite long queues, waiting lists and some people not being able to get appointments because of lack of availability, the vaccination is continuing, although slower than he had hoped.
” This is definitely forward progress and it shows how we are working to maximize every dose we received from the federal government to administer the vaccine to those currently eligible, including our seniors, and it also shows the increased rates of vaccinations by CVS and Walgreens given to the older adults, residents with disabilities, and workers in our long-term care facilities,” Murphy said. Make no mistake, while this is a significant milestone, we have a good ways to go to reach our ultimate goal of 4.7 million vaccinated adults by the beginning of summer. I’m in that Memorial Day to Fourth of July window. We are definitely on our way but we need much greater supply to get the vaccination infrastructure we purpose-built from the ground up working to its full potential, especially in the six mega sites that are capable. In the aggregate, those six sites are capable of vaccinating 10,000 to 15,000 people a day.”