Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer will receive a dose of the Pfizer Covid vaccine at Ford Field at an event to promote and encourage Michigan residents to get the vaccine on April 6, 2021 in Detroit, Michigan.
Matthew Hatcher | Getty Images
A senior health official for the Biden administration said on Monday that Michigan must “shut things down” as it grapples with an overwhelming increase in coronavirus cases.
Rochelle Walensky, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said a boost in Covid-19 vaccinations alone isn’t the answer – even if Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer calls on the federal government to send more vaccines its way.
“I think if we try to work our way out of what is happening in Michigan, we would be disappointed that it took so long for the vaccine to work and actually have an effect,” Walensky said during a White House briefing on the pandemic. . . It takes several weeks for immunizations to start and reduce the caseload, she noted.
The state’s best bet, Walensky said, “is to really shut things down.”
Walensky called on Michigan “to go back to where we were last spring, last summer and shut things down, flatten the curve, reduce contact” and step up contact testing and tracking . The number of cases in Michigan has risen dramatically in recent weeks, reaching an average of 7,359 new cases per day in the past week and approaching the pandemic highs around Thanksgiving, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. Deaths are also on the rise.
“What we really need to do in those situations is shut things down,” Walensky said.
Whitmer, a Democrat in a politically purple state where shutdowns were particularly controversial, was reluctant to impose new restrictions in response to the most recent rise in the number of cases.
Last week, she asked residents of her state to voluntarily limit their activities and urged schools to temporarily stop personal learning. But she stressed that “to be very clear, these are not orders, mandates, or requirements.”
According to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, no state records more daily infections per capita than Michigan.
Much of the current wave stems from a highly contagious variant of Covid, B.1.1.7, which is now the most common strain of the virus in the US.
Whitmer called on President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday to flood her state with vaccines, going so far as to urge the government to “set up a vaccination program to help states like Michigan.” The government is reportedly willing to send some funds to the state, but not vaccines.
Walensky, without speaking directly to Whitmer, went back on the call to ship additional vaccines to states with serious outbreaks.
“There are different tools we can use for different periods” of an outbreak, Walensky said during Monday’s briefing.
“We know that if vaccines are put into use today, depending on the vaccine, we will see no effect from those vaccines for two to six weeks,” she said. “So if you have an acute situation, an extraordinary number of cases like we have in Michigan, the answer isn’t necessarily vaccination. In fact, we know the vaccine will have a delayed response.”
“Likewise, we need that vaccine in other places,” Walensky said. “If we vaccinate today, we’ll have an impact in six weeks, and we don’t know where the next place will be that will rise.”
CNBC’s Berkeley Lovelace Jr. contributed to this report.