WASHINGTON – In a sharp break with the Trump administration, Elected President Joseph R. Biden Jr. plans to release almost all available doses of the coronavirus vaccine shortly after being inaugurated, rather than millions of scales to keep the second doses guaranteed. available.
The decision is part of an aggressive effort to “ensure that the Americans who need it most get it as soon as possible,” the Biden transition team said Friday. The vaccination plan, which will be formally launched next week, will also include federal vaccination sites at locations such as high school gyms and sports stadiums, and mobile units to reach high-risk populations.
The president-elect promised to get “at least 100 million Covid vaccine shots in the arms of the American people” during his first 100 days in office.
The decision to release the vast majority of vaccine doses has sparked a heated debate among public health experts. The two vaccines that received emergency approval each require two doses, and the Trump administration has so far withheld about half of its stock to ensure that booster doses are available to those who have already been vaccinated.
Officials from Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s vaccination program, noted that doses would no longer be sequestered after the first few weeks of rollout. But the announcement by the Biden administration suggests the clearest measure yet to upload photos, and distribute them as soon as they are available. And Warp Speed officials were critical of the president-elect’s decision on Friday.
The Food and Drug Administration – whose advice Biden promised to follow – spoke out strongly against changing the dosing schedule, as some other countries preferred, calling such a move ‘premature and not thoroughly rooted in the available evidence not. Some public health experts fear that the second dose will be delayed by the decision.
But others called it a clever measure, saying it was essential to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible – as long as the second doses were not delayed. The Biden team said they were confident the offer would be adequate, and that Mr. Biden will appeal to the Defense Production Act if necessary to strengthen the supply of second doses.
“The President-elect believes that we need to accelerate the distribution of the vaccine while continuing to ensure that the Americans who need it most receive it as soon as possible,” said TJ Ducklo, a spokesman for the Biden Transition Team. , said.
The announcement that Mr. Biden plans to release extra doses coincide with a letter from eight Democratic governors – including Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who both clashed with President Trump – asking for the current government to release all available doses to the states as soon as possible.
“The failure to distribute these doses to states requesting them is unscrupulous and unacceptable,” the governors wrote in a letter obtained by The New York Times on Friday to Secretary of Health Alex M. Azar II and Gen. . Gustave F. Perna, who is responsible for the distribution of vaccines.
“We demand that the federal government distribute these reserved doses to states immediately,” the letter said.
Mr. Biden’s promise of 100 million gunshots is an ambitious promise, and the Trump administration’s rocky roll – which Mr. Biden called ‘a travesty’ on Friday – did not facilitate his task. As of Thursday, the Trump administration had shipped more than 21 million vaccine doses, and millions more were already in the hands of the federal government.
Yet only 5.9 million people received a dose. Civil servants and local public health officials, already overwhelmed by increasing infections, are struggling to administer the vaccine to hospital workers and older Americans, while most people remain in the dark when they can be protected.
The presidential transition
The biggest problem so far has not been the lack of vaccine, but the problems facing the state and local governments with the distribution of the doses they have. Capacity and logistics, and not shortages, do not hold the vaccine.
Dr Leana S. Wen, an emergency physician and public health expert at the George Washington University School of Public Health, said she was surprised and concerned about the new strategy of Mr. Biden.
“This is not the problem we are trying to solve now,” said Dr. Wen said.
Officials at Operation Warp Speed were also critical.
At a news conference on Friday, dr. FDA commissioner Stephen M. Hahn called on states that used only a small portion of their offer to vaccinate lower-priority groups while still adhering to government guidelines. Most states still prioritize frontline health workers and older Americans in group residential settings.
The expansion of the target groups “will help a lot to use these vaccines in the right way and get into the arms of individuals,” said dr. Hahn said.
Biden’s advisers did not discuss the rest of their plan to revamp the distribution of vaccines; they say more details will be announced next week. Mr. Biden has always promised a much more muscular federal response than Mr. Trump’s leave-it-to-the-states approach. Candidates of the Democratic Senate.
“Our plan will focus on getting shots in the arms, including starting a fundamentally new approach, and establishing thousands of federal governments or federal support centers from different types of communities in places like high school gyms and NFL stadiums,” he said. . Biden said during an interview with WFXE-FM in Columbus, Ga.
“And,” he continues, “they can be managed by federal staff, contractors, volunteers, including FEMA, you know, the emergency management team, the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. military, the National Guard.”
A person familiar with the vaccination plan of Mr. Biden, said it would take time to establish massive vaccination sites. Mr. Biden himself said on Friday that the vaccination effort would be “the biggest operational challenge we will ever face as a nation” – one that will cost ‘billions of dollars’.
Joshua M. Sharfstein, a former top FDA official who is now a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, said that mobile devices will be especially important to reach people in rural areas, as well as underpopulated people, where transportation or lack of interest was an obstacle to vaccination.
“We need to make the vaccine readily available to people who are excited to get it now, and we need to go out and reach people who have a special risk but still have questions about whether or not they can do so after the vaccination sites,” he said. said. “If we only vaccinate people who are excited to be vaccinated, we will miss people who really need to be vaccinated and deserve to have special access.”
However, the dosing schedule is a major complication. Strength shots for the Moderna vaccine should be given four weeks after administration; for the vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech, the interval is three weeks. On Friday, World Health Organization officials issued recommendations stating that the interval between the administration of two doses of Pfizer vaccine could double to six weeks. But the FDA has not approved such a move.
Mr. Biden, who was given the vaccine almost three weeks ago, will receive his second dose on Monday, his spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki told reporters on Friday.
With the virus raging across the country, and more than 367,000 Americans already dead from Covid-19, some experts have expressed hope that the explosion of the vaccine could bring the pandemic under control.
But there is still not enough data to know what effect the vaccine has on the transmission of the virus. And without knowing what the effect of the vaccine is on the transmission, it is impossible to predict whether more people will be vaccinated.
Olivia Prosper, a mathematical model at the University of Tennessee, said the models that load the impact of the first doses up front are interesting.
But while “they bring a lot of food for thought and some hypotheses to test,” it is still premature to use them to inform public policy, she said. Models also have their limits, she noted, because most do not take into account the country’s informed vaccination strategy, which prioritizes people with high exposure and high risk for early shots.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports from Washington, and Katherine J. Wu from New York.