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President Biden’s ambitious plan to improve the implementation of the coronavirus vaccine in the US has taken a hit.
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About 20 million doses of vaccines are missing, reports Politico. The government delivered them to states, but states did not administer them to patients.
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The Trump administration could not find out where the vaccine doses went and when they were delivered to states.
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President Biden has ambitious pandemic plans for his first few months in office: by mid-February, he wants one hundred federal coronavirus virus support centers. By the end of April, he wants 100 million doses in Americans’ arms, requiring an average of 1 million shots to be given per day.
But his administration has suffered a setback in the White House for the first ten days: about 20 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine are not declared – the federal government paid for it and delivered it to states, but there is no record that the doses transferred to patients.
Biden’s recent COVID response team last week tried to manually locate these millions of missing doses by calling on officials and health care providers from different states, Politico reported on Saturday.
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“I think they were really caught off guard,” one Biden adviser told Politico. “It’s a mess.”
The previous government chose not to track the doses of vaccines in every step from the federal to the patient’s pipeline; ‘Operation Warp speed’, Donald Trump’s vaccination program, which began with the distribution of vaccines, prioritized the dose distribution and did not require states to provide updates on what happened to their doses until the shots were fired.
According to the CDC, fifty million doses have been distributed to US states, but only 31 million of the doses have been administered across the country.
To accelerate the explosion of the vaccine in the country, Biden’s team needs to determine what explains the clear difference between distributed and administered doses – and what the threshold is.
“Nobody had a complete picture”
The Trump administration had hoped to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of 2020, but fell short in part because it accepted no responsibility for overseeing state-level vaccine vaccination.
Many state health departments have said they do not have enough funding and staff to manage mass vaccinations. Over the past month, vaccine shortages have forced clinics in states like Virginia to cancel the vaccine appointments.
Biden cited the U.S. vaccination under Trump as a sad failure.
Prior to the January 20 inauguration, the Trump administration did not provide detailed information on how federal to state distribution passed on to members of Biden’s transition team.
While the federal government has a detective for the distribution of vaccines, named Tiberius, the transition team did not get access to it until a few days before Biden took office, Politico reports. It then took some time before Biden’s COVID response team discovered that Tiberius had only tracked how many doses of conditions had been received, and records indicating when and where doses were administered.
Every part of the process between these two steps – distribution of vaccines to states and the vaccines inserted into the arms – was an unseen black box.
“Nobody had a complete picture,” Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team, told Politico. “The plans that were made were made on the assumption that more information would be available and made public as soon as they came into the White House.”
‘There are places with vaccines that they do not use yet’
States’ public health systems presumably keep track of where vaccine doses are stored, when they are sent from state warehouses to clinics, and how many doses are located where. But for now, the federal government has no idea what the detection looks like there, and what distribution plan each state follows.
Biden’s advisers told Politico that the missing doses were spread across the states, but that the COVID response team did not yet have to track them all down or determine why the vaccines were not being administered immediately.
“A lot of our work over the next week is going to allow us to sharpen the timelines to understand where the vaccine actually is and when exactly it is being administered,” said Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the CDC. USA Today Thursday.
Two officials told Politico that a backlog in reporting was missing 10% of the doses. It takes up to three days before states report that they have fired a shot.
But the other 18 million doses that are not taken into account are stored in the freezer and warehouses, kept in reserves at clinics or in transit – across the country.
Some states, concerned about impending vaccine shortages, are holding hundreds of thousands of doses in reserve, so citizens who received their first doses guaranteed that a second dose would be waiting for them after the required interval of three or four weeks.
The Biden government hopes that more transparency about when and how many doses will be sent to states over the next three weeks will encourage government officials to stop keeping doses in the reserve.
“We know there are places in the country without enough vaccine, and at the same time there are places with vaccines that they are not using yet,” Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the COVID response team, told USA Today. “This is a natural challenge that states face.”
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