A message from CentraState’s President and CEO John T. Gribbin regarding CentraState’s role in the vaccine distribution site process.

The state receives an allotment of approximately 100,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses every week, which are then distributed to well over 200 vaccination sites throughout New Jersey. The state doesn’t know its allocation beyond the next week. They are hopeful to see this increase to 130,000 per week shortly.

As one of those sites, CentraState doesn’t know much in advance how many vaccine doses we will receive in any given week, if at all, or when we will receive them because of the complex process the state must manage.  We are notified late in the week for the following week, but it is only when we receive confirmation of our shipment that we can begin to schedule for that allotted supply.  We do not schedule people for vaccines we don’t know we will get.  In this way, people we are able to schedule can be confident they will not be cancelled.  We hope this will change soon as manufacturing of the vaccine ramps up.

Because demand for the vaccine far exceeds the supply, currently by a factor of 10x, appointments fill up very quickly.  The state estimates about 22,000 vaccines per day are now occurring, but closer to 80,000 are needed to reach the goal of vaccinating 70% of our population by May.  We now need manufacturing to ramp up.

This is a severe challenge for us all and we understand the frustration with the current situation.  If you have difficulty getting an appointment, please understand we are all trying our best and we ask for your patience.

To fill out a vaccine appointment request form, please visit centrastate.com/vaccine. The form will be displayed on that page when appointments are available after receiving allotments from the state. We appreciate your patience as we work to meet the needs of our community.