Dr. Celine Gounder, member of President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid advisory board, condemned the Trump administration’s patchy response as some states in the US are rushing to get the vaccine doses they need.
“I think we’ve already had too much of a patchwork reaction in the United States,” Gounder said in a Monday night interview in “The News with Shepard Smith.”
In a briefing on the coronavirus on Friday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the federal government is sending his state 50,000 fewer doses of the vaccine than the week before. The state was receiving fewer doses as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended vaccination options to anyone over the age of 65 on Jan. 12.
On Monday, Cuomo sent a letter to Pfizer asking if the state of New York could buy vaccines directly from the company. Last week, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer made a similar request to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar.
Gounder told host Shepard Smith that this approach can cause more problems than fix it.
“I think Governor Cuomo himself had said in the spring that the situation around fans was essentially ‘one big Ebay,’ with all states bidding against each other for fans, and I think this kind of approach to vaccine allocation is going to be fair. said result in the same kind of situation that he himself criticized last spring, ”said Gounder.
Data from the CDC shows that the US gets an average of about 900,000 vaccinations per day. During an interview with Fox News, Azar mentioned the CDC number and criticized the Biden administration’s target of “100 million shots in the first 100 days.”
“We will have distributed 250 million doses of vaccine by the end of April,” said Azar. “If they’ve only had 100 million vaccinations by then, it will be a tragic waste of the opportunity we’ve given them.”
Gounder, an epidemiologist at NYU, qualified Azar’s statement, noting that distribution did not mean the vaccine was actually injected.
“However, we’ve seen that distribution is very different from getting guns, that the last mile of delivery is really the hardest part here,” Gounder explains. “Second, we have yet to confirm that that number of doses, that number of 250 million that he mentions there, will actually come out.”
Cuomo accused him in a separate letter to Azar for “confusing” the public about vaccine stocks. Azar admitted on Friday that no stock currently exists.
Biden advisor Dr. Michael Osterholm warned that the worst of the Covid pandemic is yet to come, and the data backs up his grim prediction. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the US is rapidly approaching 400,000 deaths in the pandemic. That equates to about one in 822 Americans. According to the Covid Tracking Project, at least 23,000 people have been in ICUs for 19 consecutive days because of Covid in the US. The HHS reported that nearly 80% of the IC beds are occupied nationwide.
Gounder said the US is now in “our fifth peak” and that the coming months is all about “layered protection” to avoid another.
“We really need to redouble on things like masking and social distance, outdoors instead of indoors, well-ventilated areas,” Gounder warned. “If we do those things, then, yes, this may be our last peak, but it really depends on each of us doing whatever it takes to get back to normal life.”