President-elect Joe Biden this week criticized the Trump administration for ‘backlog’ on attempts to vaccinate Americans against the coronavirus and promised more federal involvement under his supervision. Amid concerns over the rate of vaccine deployment, President Donald Trump said it was up to countries to speed up vaccinations.
“The federal government has distributed the vaccines to the states,” Trump said. tweeted on Wednesday. “Now it’s up to the states to administer.”
Critics say Trump’s team has too much responsibility for vaccinations on health care departments that are still struggling with the pandemic, while not pushing for Congress earlier. Legislators eventually approved nearly $ 9 billion for the distribution of vaccine in their year-end aid package, but states say it will take weeks to do things like set up mass vaccination sites and launch public education campaigns.
“They should have done it early. And they should have gotten that money to the states, ”said Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “And then they had to work with states to set up all these places, so that by the time the vaccines arrived we had all the premises where the vaccinations would take place.”
The government has made rosy assessments about what will surely be the largest vaccination attempt in U.S. history, beginning with the assertion of HHS secretary Alex Azar in October that the country by the end of the year to 100 million doses, or enough for 50 million people to be vaccinated with a two-shot regimen. The target has been gradually scaled down to 40 million doses, enough for 20 million people to be vaccinated – a measure that federal officials have repeatedly quoted about the last few months.
As for shots fired so far, “we are certainly not at the numbers by the end of December,” said Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading expert on infectious diseases. CNN Tuesday. Federal health officials on Wednesday expressed their confidence that the rate of vaccinations will increase as early as next week.
“We are launching a vaccine campaign amid a pandemic after a year of weakened and strained healthcare providers and public health departments, and we are launching a vaccine campaign during the winter holidays,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and respiratory diseases said on a press call.
Operation Warp Speed, the government’s vaccine accelerator, says it plans to allocate 20 million shots to states by the end of the year, although the last five million will only be delivered in the first week of January. The government is keeping another 20 million doses in reserve so that people can receive their second shots weeks later.
Moncef Slaoui, the head of OWS, defended the 20 million goal, saying the government is true to its word.
“The commitment we can make is to make vaccine doses available … and I think that is being met,” Slaoui said last week, adding that vaccinations “are taking place more slowly than we thought they would.”
Government officials say it takes time to push up any vaccination effort, let alone the huge Covid venture. States and hospitals are knock out who gets the shots first. The vaccine made by Pfizer must be saved at ultra-cold temperatures. And local officials say they are figuring out how to carry out a mass vaccination effort while the virus is still spreading.