The first doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine are on the move. By year’s end, states should receive about 3/4 of the amount they will need to give the highest priority people the first of their two shots.

The Washington Post did the footwork to pull together estimates for all 50 states of how many doses each will receive in the first shipments and how many in the rest of 2020, assuming the Moderna vaccine is authorized in a week.

(Note: the top of the Post’s article says it is being made freely available due to the pandemic, but I’m not a sub­scriber and could not read it without playing tricks with Javascript. That’s some kind of “free.”)

The shipment numbers are just estimates, because the US government’s Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is not providing the true figures.

If these estimates are close to accurate, Minnesota will be able to vaccinate about 59% of its population of health-care workers and nursing home residents and staff — 230,000 out of 394,000 — with the first of two doses. I’m assuming that the numbers the Post presents take into account OWS’s plans to hold back half of the initial shipments from Pfizer and Moderna in order to supply second shots to the states three weeks after the first batch.

Below is the Post’s summary figure for Minnesota’s vaccination priorities. These numbers have to be rough estimates as well, as the membership in categories such as “essential workers,” “first responders,” and “pre-existing conditions” is not set in stone.