New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) has blamed Walgreens and the federal government for the slow explosion of the vaccine during an interview on Wednesday night on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith.”
“The big reason is the federal program with CVS and Walgreens,” Murphy said. “They basically collected these doses, they punched visits to nursing homes for long-term care, long life maintenance, especially Walgreens, and this is where most of the doses still used are.”
Murphy suggested to Shepard Smith that Walgreens “need to put more corpses on the case” to solve the deployment problem.
On Tuesday, Murphy said that New Jersey is effectively equipped to dispense the vaccine, but that all the suppliers are missing, “are the doses of the vaccine.” New Jersey has a population of approximately 8,882 million people, and has distributed 898,550 vaccines, while only 432,220 of them are administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Murphy pointed to the doses of the Covid vaccine under state control and said they get into the arms more efficiently.
“You can’t find many doses in hospitals or other distribution points that we control directly and that are not used,” Murphy said. “We get shots with all the areas we can control.”
Smith pushed back with Murphy, emphasizing that ‘the people are losing’ when it comes to the slow vaccination of vaccines. More than 123,000 Americans are currently hospitalized and an average of 3,000 people die every day, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data. Since the pandemic began early last year, more than 400,000 people have died. Murphy pointed to the federal government.
“There is no doubt that we have a huge imbalance in supply and demand, starting with all due respect to the federal government, at least to this day, after dropping the ball – too promising and under delivery,” he said. said Murphy. “So if Walgreens bats 1000, if CVS bats 1000 and we as a state continue to do what we do, who get the vaccines in people’s arms, we’re still being let down by the Feds.”
Murphy has asked up to $ 20 billion in federal aid to help Covid deficits. President Joe Biden said Friday that he will use the Defense Production Act to boost the vaccine supply during his first month in office.