Civil servants on Friday sounded hopeful that they could achieve the new goal on May 1, which Biden announced after giving just a few hours notice to governors on Thursday night. But they are also wary of too much reward and recognize that a number of factors can increase the vaccination effort. It is a hard truth that public officials need to send messages carefully to prevent a crisis-weary public from being eager to put the pandemic behind them.
“It’s a good thing to strive for, but I just think we should probably keep an eye on it and see how it goes with us when we come in April,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health, said. Officials, said about Biden’s purpose.
In anticipation of an influx of doses, some states have already expected to open one-off shots for all adults in the coming weeks. After Alaska became the first to do so on Tuesday, governors in Utah and Michigan announced this week that they would move in that direction. Ohio and Connecticut are also on track to reach Biden’s goal, governors spokesmen said.
White House officials have repeatedly expressed themselves as willing partners to help states vaccinate their residents, in contrast to the Trump administration, which has left states to handle much of the elevator. Biden promises new federal resources to help the effort, and signs a $ 1.9 billion Covid emergency relief plan that was passed only by Democratic votes. These include significantly expanding the number of mass vaccinations, pharmacies and community health centers and sending more medical staff across the country. The administration also promises to set up a new nationwide website and call center by May 1 to help Americans arrange appointments, while promising new technical assistance to states to improve their own reporting systems.
“We have spent a lot of time on supply, the number of places, the number of vaccinations, and we believe May 1st is the right deadline,” White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients said during a Friday press briefing.
Despite the new federal aid, civil servants are still working on logistical issues that may not be completely resolved in the next seven weeks.
In Oklahoma, where the state is already eligible for the vast majority of adults, officials say they want to set up more vaccination centers across the state to accommodate the greater supply.
“It does us not much good to have millions of doses or hundreds of thousands of doses and only a narrow place to which someone has access,” said Keith Reed, deputy commissioner for health, in Oklahoma.
Some government officials also said they were worried about moving too fast to expand the qualification when many high-risk people had not yet had the chance to make appointments. Many states that have attempted to qualify on the basis of risks have already thrown out the playbooks because the vaccination effort has lagged behind.
‘We are also starting to lose control over the hierarchy of vulnerable patients, so we want to make sure we really focus on that. [that]”” Clay Marsh, the coronavirus tsar of West Virginia, said his state could be broadly eligible within the next month, he said.
Since the sluggish start of the country’s vaccination campaign, the rate has increased to more than 2 million doses per day. The US has passed the 100 million dose milestone on Friday since the vaccination campaign began almost three months ago. A quarter of the adult population received at least their first shot, including 61 percent of people aged 65 and older, a group particularly susceptible to the virus.
An expected increase in vaccine production in the coming weeks should mean that states are flooded with new doses. But some government officials say they are reluctant to plan too far ahead without having a concrete understanding of their expected allocations. The Biden administration has given states at least three weeks notice of the expected shipments, but has promised to provide a larger window to help their planning.
In Oregon, government officials originally planned to be eligible for vaccines for anyone over the age of 45 on June 1 and for the general population. But the state will accelerate the timeline “as doses increase,” a top official said.
“We will know a lot more if we can better see our vaccine supply,” said Patrick Allen, head of the Oregon Health Authority.
The state is considering taking the Biden administration’s offer of technical assistance to scale up its registration system, Allen said. The state recently revamped its faulty appointment system after Portland area residents made 400,000 attempts to plan only 3,400 appointments at the Oregon Convention Center. It now requires residents to register in advance, and the state chooses names through a lottery – a system that, according to Allen, is ‘scalable’.
Other health officials said the goal on May 1 would help states set priorities.
“It’s good to know that this is the vision – it’s something that is being put out there in advance so that we can make sure that our systems and strategies meet the task on May 1,” said Adriane Casalotti, head of government, the National Association of Provincial and Urban Health Officials.
“A lot needs to be done in our systems and collaboration in public health and healthcare to be ready for the date,” Casalotti added.
Brianna Ehley contributed to this report.