Elected President Joe Biden’s member of the Covid Advisory Board, dr. Celine Gounder, slammed the Trump administration’s pieces of Covid response while some states in the US scrambled to get the vaccine doses they needed.
“I think we’ve had way too much of a patchwork reaction across the state,” Gounder said in a Monday night interview on ‘The News with Shepard Smith.’
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a Friday coronavirus briefing that the federal government was sending his state 50,000 doses less vaccination than the week before. The state received fewer doses because the Jan. 12 disease control and prevention centers are eligible for vaccination for anyone over the age of 65.
Cuomo sent a letter to Pfizer on Monday asking if the state of New York could buy vaccines directly from the company. Last week, the Government of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, made a similar request to Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Gounder told host Shepard Smith that this approach could cause more problems than it solves.
“I think Governor Cuomo himself said in the spring that the situation around fans was essentially ‘one big Ebay’, with all the states offering each other for fans, and I think this kind of approach to the allocation of vaccines is “Honestly, result in the same situation that he himself criticized last year,” Gounder said.
Data from the CDC show that the US takes on average about 900,000 vaccinations per day. During an interview with Fox News, Azar quoted the CDC number and criticized the Biden government’s goal of ‘100 million gunshots in the first 100 days’.
“We will have distributed 250 million doses of vaccine by the end of April,” Azar said. “If they had only done 100 million vaccinations by that time, it would be a tragic waste of the opportunity we gave them.”
Gounder, an NYU epidemiologist, qualified Azar’s statement, pointing out that distribution does not mean actual injections of the vaccine.
“However, we have seen that the spread is very different than getting shots in the arms, that the last mile of delivery here is really the hardest part,” Gounder explained. “Secondly, we have yet to confirm that the number of doses, that 250 million number he mentions there, is really going to expand.”
Cuomo exploded in a separate letter to Azar for “confusing” the public about vaccines. Azar acknowledged on Friday that there is currently no stock.
Michael Osterholm, Biden’s adviser, has warned that the worst of the Covid pandemic is yet to come, and the data supports his grim prediction. According to Johns Hopkins University data, the US is fast approaching 400,000 deaths in the pandemic. That equates to about one in 822 Americans. According to the Covid Tracking Project, there were at least 23,000 people in ICUs for 19 consecutive days due to Covid in the US. The HHS reports that nearly 80% of ICU beds nationwide are occupied.
Gounder said the U.S. is currently “our fifth peak” and that the next few months are all about “protection in layers” to avoid another.
“We really need to double things like masking and social distance, outside instead of inside, well-ventilated spaces,” Gounder warned. “If we do those things, then it may be our last climax, but it really depends on each of us doing what is necessary to return to normal life.”