Millions of doses of coronavirus vaccine are still sitting in freezers, allocated in excess to nursing homes or stockpiled for later use.

Health providers around the country figured as well that it was prudent to squirrel away vials to ensure that everyone who got a first dose of vaccine got a second one.

Cuomo has pushed the Biden administration to allow him to claw back 100,000 excess doses that were allocated to the federal program for long-term-care facilities.

Khaldun, the chief medical executive, is raiding nursing home doses that she said had been locked in a “piggy bank” controlled by CVS and Walgreens, the two pharmacy chains in charge of the federal initiative.

Danny Avula, the state’s vaccine coordinator, said he has been “wheeling and dealing like on a trading floor” to free up tens of thousands of doses for the general population.

Then, in talks with six of the state’s hospital systems, he offered a deal: If they released the vials they were saving for second doses, they would be guaranteed two doses later for every vial they surrendered.

The gap between the number of doses shipped to states and the number injected into arms is narrowing: More than three-fourths of the doses delivered are now being used, compared with less than half in late January, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data tracker.

Freeing them up could increase the number of doses used by more than 10 percent — significantly stepping up the pace of the nation’s inoculation program at a time when speed is of the essence to save lives, curb disease and head off more contagious variants of the virus.

Avula said, they had used fewer than one in every three doses they had on hand.

Even more vaccine has been hoarded as second doses, federal and state officials say.

The White House has been urging states not to squirrel away second doses ahead of time, and is providing three-week projections of supply as reassurance that they will not come up short.

“We believe that some health care providers are regularly holding back doses that are intended as first doses and instead keeping them in reserve for second doses,” Andy Slavitt, a White House adviser, said at the start of the month.

But prying loose more second doses requires wary health care officials to have faith in a brand-new supply chain, said Dr.

“There’s been this big push that we shouldn’t hold vaccine for second doses, we should just give it because there will be more,” he said.

“But I think that’s asking a lot from vaccine providers, because their heart is in the place that they gave somebody a vaccine and they want to make sure when that person comes back for their second dose, it will be there.”.

6 to run the state’s vaccine program.

Nationally, federal officials estimate that accounts for only about 2 percent of doses that show up as unused.

“In some cases we’re proactively asking that they ‘reclaim’ allocation we won’t need.” He added that the excess doses in Virginia amounted to only 13 percent of what CVS had been allocated there.

They gave the hospital administrators an ironclad guarantee of two fresh second doses of vaccine for every stockpiled second dose they gave up — one dose to cover the person for whom the second dose was designated, and one to cover the person who got the freed-up dose.

Mike Dacey, the firm’s president, said he wanted the hospitals’ freezers to be empty of vaccine by the end of each week.

Northam said in an interview that he wanted doses used within three or four days of arrival

On Wednesday, Virginia updated its official website to show precisely how much vaccine had been delivered to more than 240 of the state’s health care providers — and how much had been used