Top health officials in the U.S. have urged states to start vaccinating people more widely, acknowledging that the implementation of immunization was slower than expected, and opening up to a wider range of Americans to start shooting.
Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, on Wednesday blamed the launch of Covid-19 shots during the holiday and too detailed state plans to thwart the vaccination campaign. He urged governors to vaccinate more elderly and other high-risk populations to prevent shots being fired in freezers.
Photographer: Micah Green / Bloomberg
If governors ‘use all the vaccine that is allocated, ordered, shipped, distributed, they get it in the arms of healthcare providers, that’s great,’ Azar said. ‘But if their distribution is struggling for some reason and there are vaccines in freezers, then you have to open them anyway to 70 and older, 65 and older. You need to make sure that patients are vaccinated in the nursing home. ”
Approximately 5.2 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. has been administered in the US since mid-December, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. According to Bloomberg’s tracker, this is about 31% of the doses distributed so far.
Accelerated plans
Azar and other officials from Operation Warp Speed said the vaccinations would begin to accelerate, although they would not give the number of shots fired daily and how much they would give by the end of the month. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, said in an interview with the Washington Post earlier Wednesday that he expects the U.S. to deliver about 1 million shots a day, a number that officials from Operation Warp Speed declined comments.
HHS has announced that it will donate $ 3 billion to states, territories and some cities to support Covid-19 vaccinations. The department will also provide $ 19.1 billion to jurisdictions for testing, contact detection and other pandemic mitigation measures.
Azar said the government was investigating factors that had delayed implementation over the past few weeks. Operation Warp Speed will close its partnership with more than a dozen pharmacy chains sooner than expected to increase vaccinations. Azar said states could start sending doses to participating locations.
(Updates with additional details in the last two paragraphs.)