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Every afternoon, Cyrus Shahpar, MD, the data guru for the White House COVID-19 Response Team, sends an email to staff members with the daily score of COVID-19 vaccinations delivered in the United States.
The numbers, collected from statements before the final figures are posted on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, serve as a report card of the team’s efforts.
On Saturday, April 3, it was a new record: 4.1 million vaccinations delivered in one day, more than the total population of some states.
NEW: 4.1 million vaccines reported today.
From 3.5 million last Saturday.
— Andy Slavitt (@aslavitt46) April 3, 2021
Although the United States still has a long way to go before it can do with COVID-19, there is finally good news in the country’s long and blunder battle through the pandemic.
After a rocky start in December and January, vaccination is happening faster than almost anyone thought. As more people see friends and family roll up their sleeves, so does the hesitation.
In institutions where large numbers of people are vaccinated, such as nursing homes, COVID-19 cases and deaths have plunged.
However, these profits were not divided equally. According to CDC data, 69% of people who have been fully vaccinated are white, while only 8% are black and about 9% are Spanish, a group that now represents the most new COVID-19 cases.
Officials say it is partly because the vaccines were first rolled out to the elderly. The average life expectancy for black people in the United States is now 72 years old, which means there were fewer coloreds in the first groups eligible. Experts are hopeful that under-represented groups will start catching up as more states open vaccinations for younger people.
Based on the overall number of daily vaccine doses, the United States ranks third, behind China and India. According to the website Our World in Data, America ranks fourth – behind Israel, the United Kingdom and Chile – in the total share of the vaccinated population.
A positive development
This is a wonderful turnaround for a country that has not been able to set up effective tests for months, and in some resorts is still struggling to investigate new cases and quarantine their contacts.
The current average of 7 days for vaccines administered in the United States is currently more than 3 million per day.
“We knew we had to get to 3 million a day at some point if we wanted to get most people vaccinated this year, but I don’t think most people expected that to happen so early,” Eric Toner said. . MD, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, Maryland.
Before President Joe Biden took office, he promised to get 100 million shots within his first 100 days in office. After reaching the target at the end of March, he doubled it to 200 million vaccinations by 30 April. After first saying that all adults would be eligible to receive the vaccine on Tuesday, May 1, he pushed that date to April 19. .
Some media reports have seen the repeated shift of goalposts as calculated – an unprecedented strategy of delivering too little and too much with the aim of rebuilding public confidence.
But others point out that, although it is true, the goals set are not easy, and achieving them has never been taken for granted.
“I think the Biden government is really getting a lot of credit for pushing the businesses to get more vaccine faster than they planned,” Toner said. “And the states have really responded as well as the federal government regarding vaccination of sites. So not only are we getting the vaccines, we are also getting them into the arms faster than expected.”
Others agree.
“We’re doing an amazing job, and I think the U.S. is really bending the curve,” said Carlos del Rio, MD, a specialist in infectious diseases and a leading professor of medicine at Emory University in Atlanta. Georgia, said.
“I think in general it’s just that everyone does a lot of work to do it,” he said.
On Saturday, the day the United States achieved its vaccination record, he vaccinated voluntarily.
“I mean, of all the bad things we as clinicians do to people, it’s one thing people are very happy about, right?” del Rio said.
He said he had vaccinated a young woman who asked if she could video chat with her mother, who felt nervous because she was getting the chance. He answered her mother’s questions and later that day she vaccinated herself.
‘We consider it a war‘
The White House COVID-19 response team has worked hard to better coordinate the work of so many people at the federal and state levels, said Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the team, in an interview with Medscape Medical News.
“We consider it a war and in a war you do everything: you bring experienced personnel; you bring all the resources to carry; you create multiple routes,” Slavitt said. “You leave nothing to chance.”
Among the levers the administration has pulled, the use of the Defense Production Act has helped vaccine manufacturers get much-needed supplies, Slavitt said.
The administration has set up a variety of FEMA-managed vaccination centers and mobile vaccination centers to complement state-led efforts, and it has activated a federal health law called the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP), which provides immunity from liability. including retired doctors and nurses who enroll to help give vaccinations. It helped get more people shooting in the field.
The administration also canceled a plan to award vaccines to states based on their rate of administration, which would have penalized underperforming states. Instead, doses are allocated based on population.
In a media call on April 7, when asked if the government would send additional vaccines to Michigan, a state that sees a surge in COVID-19 cases with more transmissible variants, Slavitt said they do not have the vaccine supply does not manage “according to some formula.”
He said they spread among the population ‘because it is fundamental’, but that they also “surgically” detect vaccines in places with the greatest disease and where people have the greatest exposure. “
He said sites such as community health centers and retail pharmacies have the power to order vaccines directly from the federal government, which helps make more provision for severely affected areas.
Slavitt said it was gratifying 4.1 million daily vaccinations last Saturday.
“I’ve seen pictures … of people breaking down in tears when they get their vaccine, people giving standing ovations to an active army for taking care of them,” he said, “and I think of people who for ‘ a long time without hope, or who was very scared. ‘
“It’s incredibly encouraging to think of a few million people taking another step back to normal life,” he said.
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