WASHINGTON (AP) – It sounded so ambitious at first glance: 100 million shots in 100 days
Now, a month after his presidency, Joe Biden is on a slide to achieve that goal, moving much further towards the much more ambitious and daunting mission of vaccinating all eligible adults against the coronavirus. towards the end of summer.
Limited offer of the two approved COVID-19 vaccines hampered the pace of vaccinations – and that was before extreme winter weather slowed delivery of about 6 million doses in the past week. But the United States is on the verge of a supply breakthrough as production increases and a third vaccine is expected. become available in the coming weeks.
That means that administering injections will soon be the dominant limitation, and it is prompting the Biden administration to drastically expand the universe of those who will be administering injections and where Americans will meet them to take their photos.
“It’s one thing to have the vaccine, and it’s quite another to get it in someone’s arms,” Biden said Friday as he visited Pfizer’s plant. in Portage, Michigan. The company will double the pace of vaccine deliveries in the coming weeks.
Since their approval in December, more than 75 million doses of the two-injection schedule Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been distributed, 63 million of which have been injected, reaching 13% of Americans. Nearly 45 million of those doses have been administered since Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
The pace at which those vaccines are being delivered is about to take off. About 145 million doses are scheduled for delivery in the next 5 1/2 weeks, with another 200 million expected by the end of May and another 200 million by the end of July.
That’s ahead of the expected Food and Drug Administration approval for emergency use of a third vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson. The single-dose J&J vaccine is expected to help speed the path to immunity and requires half the vaccination resources of the two-step regimens. But there isn’t a huge supply of J&J doses ready to roll out on day one.
“We’re starting with just a few million in stock,” said White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients last week. Still, coupled with the expected increases in the other vaccines, the J&J doses could prove critical progress in delivering enough injections for nearly all US adults by the end of June, at least a month earlier than currently expected.
The daily inoculation average rose to 1.7 million injections per day last week, but it is expected that an average of twice the number of doses will soon be available on average. The focus of Biden’s team is now quickly shifting to ensuring those doses can get used to, though the administration has resisted calls from some health experts to publicly set a ‘moonshot’ target for the number of daily doses it hopes to deliver.
Biden first set his goal of 100 million doses in 100 days on Dec. 8, days before the first vaccines were approved for emergency use. On the day of the inauguration, it was clear that the US was on track to achieve that goal.
Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and professor of public health at George Washington University, said she would like the government to commit to a more ambitious goal of 3 million shots a day.
“I want them to put that stake in the ground and ask everyone to help them achieve that goal,” she said.
The current rate of vaccination has slowed significantly in recent days as application sites in Texas and in the South were shut down by winter weather and icy conditions stranded supplies at shipping hubs in Louisville, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee.
A third of the delayed doses have already been administered, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s largest infectious disease specialist, announced Sunday. The White House expects the remaining delayed doses to be injected by March 1 and the daily rate of vaccinations to continue to increase.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, much of the increase has come from people who got their second dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. The rate of first-dose vaccinations has remained broadly stable in recent weeks, with an average of 900,000 injections per day.
Increasing both the number of first dose administrations and the total number of vaccinations will be key to achieving herd immunity – which is estimated to require vaccination of about 80% of the population – in the hope of ending the pandemic and the emergence of potentially even more dangerous “Mutant” strains of the coronavirus.
That means that demand must remain high. The administration has expressed concern about public surveys showing that tens of millions of Americans are reluctant to get the vaccine and it broadens the public reach to overcome that hesitation as the US death toll approaches 500,000 – “a terrifying historic milestone in the history of this country,” Fauci said. expressed, and “we’re still not sure.”
Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, the White House COVID-19 data director, said in an interview that the administration is “ focused on going to communities and making sure people know these vaccines are safe and how to get them, with aim to vaccinate almost all Americans. “
The administration has also shifted its focus to identifying new delivery paths for the vaccines beyond those already in use by states, including federally run mass vaccination sites, smaller community health centers and pharmacies. The goal of the White House is to get the sites up now so they are ready to deal with the influx of vaccines in the coming weeks.
“They can get a lot more volume through those channels, through those big box stores, through the community centers,” Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner for the Trump administration, told MSNBC Friday. He praised Biden’s administration for setting up those sites in advance.
The Pentagon has begun deploying thousands of active troops at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to open massive vaccination centers across the country, with plans for as many as 100 sites that can deliver 450,000 doses per day. The first of those facilities opened in California last week, with locations in Texas and New York set to open in the coming days.
“We always knew that we should provide primarily federally-supported sites,” said Robert Fenton, FEMA’s acting administrator, last week, describing the original sites as a “pilot” for the greater deployment. “These will continue to grow as supply comes on board.”
The government has also rolled out the federal pharmacy program initially announced by Trump’s White House. It has delivered doses directly to chains such as CVS and Walgreens, using existing injection distribution chains such as the flu vaccine.
Governors, along with the CDC, identified specific retail chains to start administering the vaccines in their states, with a view to reaching disadvantaged communities and also testing the pharmacies’ ability to scale up injections.
During the first four days of surgery, involving about 15% of pharmacies across the country, the pharmacy program administered more than 700,000 of the first 1 million doses per week assigned by the federal government. That prompted the White House to rapidly double it to 2 million doses this coming week.
Further increases are likely as the White House controls the pharmacies’ ability to deliver injections. The National Association of Chain Drug Stores estimates that its members alone are capable of delivering more than 3 million doses per day.
The additional federal channels for delivering vaccinations have sparked some grumbling from governors who want even more vaccines to flow through their state allocations. That number has risen from less than 9 million doses per week to 13.5 million in Biden’s first weeks in office.
“Everyone wants more vaccines,” said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., “I know the continued increase is great news for all of us.”
“The more ways we can bring the opportunities online, the better,” she added.