WASHINGTON (AP) – It sounds so ambitious with the first blush: 100 million vaccination shots in 100 days.
Now, one month into his presidency, Joe Biden is on a slide to reach the goal and go beyond the far more ambitious and discouraging mission to vaccinate all eligible adults against the coronavirus. by the end of summer.
Limited offer of the two approved COVID-19 vaccines hampered the rate of vaccinations – and that was before the extreme winter weather delayed delivery of about 6 million doses in the past week. But the United States is on the verge of having a breakthrough in supply as production spurs and with the expectation of a third vaccine available in the coming weeks.
This means that the act of administering injections will soon be the predominant constraint, and it will encourage the Biden government to dramatically expand the universe of those who will deliver injections and where Americans will meet them to get their shots.
“It’s one thing to have the vaccine, and it’s very different to get it in someone’s arms,” Biden said on Friday as he toured Pfizer’s manufacturing plant. in Portage, Michigan. The company will double the rate of vaccine delivery in the coming weeks.
Since their approval in December, more than 75 million doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been given with two shots, of which 63 million have been injected, reaching 13% of Americans. Nearly 45 million of these doses have been administered since Biden’s inauguration on January 20th.
The rate of delivery of the vaccines is about to begin. About 145 million doses will be introduced in the next 5 1/2 weeks, with an additional 200 million expected by the end of May and a further 200 million by the end of July.
This is prior to the expected approval by Johnson & Johnson by the Food and Drug Administration for the use of a third vaccine. The single-dose J&J vaccine is expected to help speed up the path to immunity and requires half of the vaccine sources of the two-shot regimens. But there are no large stocks of J&J doses ready to perform on Day One.
“We’re going to start with just a few million stocks,” White House coordinator Jeff Zients COVID-19 said last week. However, in combination with the expected increase in the other vaccines, the doses of J&J may be the most important advance to deliver enough shots for almost all American adults by the end of June, at least a month earlier than currently expected.
The daily inoculation average climbed to 1.7 million shots per day last week, but it will soon be expected that as many as double the number of doses will be available each day. The focus of Biden’s team is now rapidly ensuring that the doses can be used, although the government has resisted calls from some health experts to publicize a ‘moon shot’ target for how many daily doses he want to deliver.
Biden first set its target of 100 million doses in 100 days on December 8, days before the first vaccines received permission for emergency use. With the Inauguration Day, it was clear that the US was on track to achieve the goal.
Dr Leana Wen, an emergency physician and professor of public health at George Washington University, said she would like to see the government take a more ambitious target of $ 3 million a day.
“I want to see them put the interest in the ground and ask everyone to help them achieve the goal,” she said.
The current rate of vaccination has dropped significantly over the past few days as winter weather closed administration sites in Texas and across the South, and icy conditions stranded supplies at delivery centers in Louisville, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee.
A third of the delayed doses have already been delivered, said dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading specialist in infectious diseases, announced Sunday. The White House anticipates that the remaining delayed doses will be injected by March 1 and that the daily rate of vaccinations will continue to rise.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the largest increase is in people receiving their second dose of Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. The rate of vaccination at the first dose, meanwhile, has been largely stable over the past few weeks, averaging 900,000 shots per day.
Increasing the dose of the first dose and the number of vaccinations will be the key to achieving herd immunity – which is estimated to vaccinate about 80% of the population – in hopes of ending the pandemic and the emergence of potentially even more dangerous to limit “Mutant” strains of the coronavirus.
This means that demand must be kept high. The administration has expressed concern about public surveys showing that tens of millions of Americans are reluctant to get the vaccine, and that it is increasing public outreach to overcome the reluctance as the US death toll approaches 500,000 – ‘a terrible historical milestone in the history of this country’, as Fauci put it has, and ‘we are still not there.’
Dr Cyrus Shahpar, the data director of the White House COVID-19, said in an interview that the government is’ focused on going out to communities and making sure people know that these vaccines are safe and how they can get, with the aim of vaccinating. almost all Americans. ”
The administration has also focused on identifying new delivery routes for the vaccines in addition to those already in use by states, including mass vaccination sites, smaller community health centers and retail pharmacies. The White House’s goal is to set up the sites now so that they will be ready to deal with the influx of vaccine in the coming weeks.
“They can push a lot more volume through the channels, through the big boxes, through the community health centers,” Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner to the Trump administration, told MSNBC on Friday. He praised the administration of Biden for setting up these sites.
At the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Pentagon began deploying thousands of active-duty troops to open mass vaccination centers across the country, with plans for as many as 100 sites that can deliver 450,000 doses per day. The first of the facilities opened in California last week, with locations in Texas and New York opening in the coming days.
“We always knew along the way that we would have to provide primarily federally supported sites,” FEMA’s acting administrator Robert Fenton said last week, describing the initial locations as a ‘pilot’ for the larger deployment. “It will continue to grow as supply comes on board.”
The administration has also introduced the federal pharmacy program initially announced by the Trump White House. It delivered doses directly to chains such as CVS and Walgreens, using existing distribution chains for injections such as flu vaccine.
Governors, along with the CDC, have identified specific retail chains to begin administering the vaccines in their states, with a view to reaching underserved communities and also testing the ability of pharmacies to scale up injections.
In the first four days of operation, with about 15% of pharmacies participating nationwide, the pharmacy program allocated more than 700,000 of the initial 1 million doses per week allocated by the federal government. As a result, the White House quickly doubled it to two million doses next week.
Further increases are likely, as the White House monitors the pharmacies’ ability to deliver injections. The National Association of Chain Drug Stores estimates that its members alone have the capacity to deliver more than 3 million doses per day.
The additional federal vaccination delivery channels have attracted a murmur from governors who want even more vaccines to flow through their state allocations. The figure rose from less than 9 million doses per week to 13.5 million in the first week of Biden.
“Everyone wants more vaccines,” said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich. “I know the steady increase is good news for all of us.”
“The more ways we can provide the opportunities online, the better,” she added.