Why It’s So Easy to Get a Flu Shot but Difficult to Get a COVID-19 Vaccine

• Experts say there are a number of reasons flu shots are more readily available than COVID-19 vaccines.
• For starters, there are currently more manufacturers of flu shots than COVID-19 vaccines.
• There’s also an established structure for distributing flu shots while the COVID-19 vaccination system is still being established.
• In addition, the Pfizer vaccine needs to be stored at ultra-low temperatures that limits where it can be delivered.

So far this flu season, more than 193 million flu shots have been distributed across the United States.

Meanwhile, more than 69 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have now been distributed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Why the disparity?

Experts say it’s not as easy as it may seem to vaccinate people against a new virus on this scale.

“One would have thought we in the U.S. could have delivered the vaccine in an efficient and effective manner. But for reasons that are beyond me, that was a more difficult task than had been anticipated,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told Healthline.

“Evidently it was much more elaborate and difficult than many of us had anticipated,” he said. “There were bumps in the road that predicted deliveries of vaccine didn’t always occur at the local level, and when vaccine arrived it was in smaller amounts than had been anticipated.”

Experts say it’s simply not as easy to roll out a new vaccine in the same way it is to distribute an annual influenza vaccine, which — due to years of planning and implementation — runs smoothly and on schedule.

“We’ve been making flu vaccines for many, many years. So all of the manufacturers have production systems and they know their targets. They each know how much vaccine they’re going to make. This is an ongoing, well-established, well-oiled machine that has been going on for many, many years,” Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of global health and infectious diseases at Stanford University in California, told Healthline.

“Whereas making a COVID vaccine… is a brand new enterprise and it requires ramping up rapidly, and carefully and safely, very, very large production plants and facilities that need to meet very strict safety and cleanliness and other criteria,” she said. “That doesn’t happen overnight. That takes time.”