New York Nurse Who Was First To Receive Covid Vaccine, Receives Second Dose
Medical worker Michelle Chester shows a Pfizer coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine before giving it to nurse Sandra Lindsay, who was among the first to receive it, and who will receive the second dose at Long Island Jewish Medical Center January 4, 2021 in the Queens borough of New York City. Shannon Stapleton-Pool/Getty Images

The Biden administration is in the dark about the location of 20 million COVID-19 vaccine doses that haven't been sent out to states.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that it has already sent out almost 50 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to states, but only over 31 million has gone to states, reported New York Post.

Once the federal government has sent off the vaccine doses, it will be up to the states to track their whereabouts but, so far, there is no record of them getting administered to patients, noted Politico.

States rely on county health departments and local health officials to arrange vaccinations since the CDC's website is not widely used. This mystery on the COVID-19 vaccine doses hampers the Biden administration's plan to speed up the national vaccine effort.

2 Million Doses Missing Due to Lags in Reporting

About two million of the 20 million missing doses are believed to come from lags in reporting from states, the Biden administration suspected.

This means the rest of the shots could be sitting in warehouses, freezers or in transit within the complex distribution system between the feds and the states.

The complex system runs vaccines from the administration down to each U.S. state.

The new COVID response team under the Biden administration spent the past week looking for these missing vaccines, said Politico. They called officials and health care providers from different states in search of the shots.

"I think they were really caught off guard by that," an adviser to Biden told the news outlet, adding that the system was "a mess."

Yahoo! News pointed out that the Trump administration's "Operation Warp Speed" chose not to conduct tracking for vaccine doses down to administering to patients.

Its tracker, named Tiberius, was only given to the Biden team days before the president took office, a took the response team some time to discover its flaws.

The tracker did not require states to give updates on the doses until the shots had been administered to patients. It only indicated the amount that each state received as well as when and where the shots were administered.

Biden Administration Falls Short in Promises for COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts

When he was sworn into office, Biden had ambitious plans to combat the pandemic.

Part of his promise was to set up 100 federally supported vaccination centers by mid-February. He also vowed vaccinating 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office.

However, he had been under fire for not even knowing how many shots the federal government has on hand.

They insisted that the vaccine program left the by the Trump administration was "in worse shape than we anticipated or expected."

Members of the Biden transition team also argued that they weren't given access to all the data of the previous administration.

A source told Politico that, "They are planning. They are competent. It's just the weight of everything when you sit down in that chair. It's heavy."

"Nobody had a complete picture," Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team said.

The Biden team worked under the assumption that more information would be made available to them and "be revealed once they got into the White House."