Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer receives a dose of Pfizer Covid vaccine at Ford Field during an event to promote and encourage Michigan residents to receive the vaccine on April 6, 2021 in Detroit, Michigan.
Matthew Hatcher | Getty Images
A health official in Biden administration said Monday that Michigan “should close business” because it is struggling with an overwhelming increase in cases of coronavirus.
Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Director Rochelle Walensky, said a boost in Covid-19 vaccinations alone is not the answer – even if the Michigan government, Gretchen Whitmer, calls on the federal government to to send more vaccines to her.
“I think if we try to vaccinate from what’s happening in Michigan, we’ll be disappointed that it takes so long for the vaccine to work, to actually have the impact,” Walensky said during a White House briefing on the pandemic. said. . It takes a few weeks before the vaccination begins and the case load is reduced, she noted.
The best thing about the state, Walensky said, “is to really close things.”
Walensky called on Michigan ‘to go back to where we were last spring, last summer, to shut things down, flatten the curve, reduce contact with each other’ and to make the effort to test and track contact, to increase. Cases in Michigan have risen dramatically in recent weeks, with an average of 7,359 new cases per day over the past week and the pandemic highs approaching Thanksgiving approaching, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Deaths are also increasing.
“What we really need to do in situations like this is to shut things down,” Walensky said.
Whitmer, a Democrat in a political press state where exclusions were particularly controversial, was reluctant to order new restrictions in response to the most recent increase in business.
Last week, she asked residents in her state to voluntarily limit their activities and urged schools to temporarily stop learning. But she stressed that “to be very clear, these are not orders, mandates or requirements.”
According to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data, no state reports more daily infections per capita than Michigan.
Much of the current boom stems from a highly contagious variant of Covid, B.1.1.7, which is now the most common virus strain in the US.
Whitmer on Friday called on President Joe Biden’s government to flood its state with vaccines, urging the government to “set up a vaccination program to help states like Michigan.” The administration is apparently willing to send some resources to the state, but not vaccines.
Walensky, without speaking directly to Whitmer, pushed back on calls to send extra vaccines to countries with serious outbreaks.
“There are different tools we can use for different periods” of an outbreak, Walensky said at Monday’s briefing.
“We know that if vaccines are taken today, we will not see an effect of the vaccines for two to six weeks, depending on the vaccine,” she said. “So if you have an acute situation, exceptional number of cases like in Michigan, the answer is not necessarily to give vaccine. In fact, we know that the vaccine will have a delayed response.”
“Similarly, we need that vaccine elsewhere,” Walensky said. “If we vaccinate today, we’ll have an impact in six weeks, and we do not know where the next place that is going to rise will be.”
– CNBC’s Berkeley Lovelace Jr. contributed to this report.