Maryland, Virginia To Send Extra COVID-19 Vaccine To D.C., Tripling Its Allotment

Washington, D.C., Fire and EMS Lt. Keishea Jackson gets a Pfizer coronavirus vaccine shot on Thursday.

Shawn Thew-Pool / Getty Images

Virginia and Maryland are sending thousands of extra COVID-19 vaccine doses out of their own supply to the District of Columbia as the city scrambles to inoculate health care workers amid the worsening pandemic.

Each state is sending 8,000 additional doses to the nation’s capital. The move will more than triple the amount of the medicine that was allotted by the federal government.

Under the current distribution formula, which is based on residency, D.C. received 6,825 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — a figure Mayor Muriel Bowser said would cover less than a tenth of the city’s health care workers who are first in line to receive the vaccine.