Illinois to ‘ramp down’ number of COVID-19 vaccines as supply starts to outweigh demand

CHICAGO (WREX) �� Illinois will begin receiving less COVID-19 vaccines from the federal government in the near future.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker made the announcement Monday morning in Chicago.

"Illinois, like the nation as a whole, has reached a point where, by and large, all the people who were immediately eager to get vaccinated, have already been vaccinated," Gov. Pritzker said.

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The governor did say the state will have the option to increase the vaccine supply later if needed.

"We've got quite a number of vaccinations that are available in the state already that are still unused and so we want to make sure that we're working through the inventory that we've got," Gov. Pritzker said. "We're going to ramp down the number of vaccination, vaccines rather, that we're getting for the state. And we obviously, the federal government has made all of that still available to us, even if we were to say we want 10% or 20% less - those doses are still available to us in the following week."

Pritzker said health officials in the state have been expecting this to happen for "some time now."

"We're well aware, you know, we have been - I've talked about it before - we had, you know, an increase of supply and dropping demand that we would get to a point where we had more supply than demand," Pritzker said. "So we've been planning for this for some time now."

A total of 9,978,915 vaccines have been administered in Illinois as of last midnight. The seven-day rolling average of vaccines administered daily is 81,265 doses.