The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks during a White House press briefing led by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki at the White House James Brady Press Room, January 21 2021, Washington, DC.
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Winter storms and power outages in Texas are a “significant” issue for the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine, White House Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anthony Fauci warned on Thursday.
“Well, obviously it’s a problem. In some places it has slowed down, stopping very hard,” Fauci said in an interview with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC. “We’ll just have to fix it as soon as the weather picks up a little, the ice melts and we can get the trucks and people out.”
“It’s significant when you have that area of the country … that is really immobilized in many ways,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The Biden administration is working to pick up the pace of vaccinations in the United States after a slower-than-expected launch under the leadership of former President Donald Trump. However, the Texas winter storm is delaying Covid-19 vaccine deliveries and forcing the temporary closure of vaccination sites.
Nearly half a million Texans are still without power since Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, after the state’s power grid was unable to keep up with heat demand during record temperatures, causing more than 4 million outages. Millions of people are still under hot water notifications, according to The Weather Channel.
Severe weather disrupted services at the FedEx hub in Memphis and caused package delays in the United States, the company said earlier this week. UPS’s Worldport Package Center in Louisville, Kentucky and another regional center in Dallas reopened after closing temporarily Monday night due to the weather.
It is unclear how this will affect the three new community vaccination centers in Dallas, Arlington and Houston, which the Biden administration intends to help build. Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden’s Tsar Covid, told reporters last week that the centers would operate in the week of February 22 and allow suppliers to manage more than 10,000 photos a day.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Once Texas opens more roads and residents have uninterrupted power, health care providers will have to do “double the time” for vaccines against Covid-19, Fauci said Thursday.
About 3 million of the approximately 29 million Texans received at least their first dose of Cff-19 vaccines with two doses of Pfizer or Moderna, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 1.2 million of those people have already gotten the second blow.
Fauci added that he did not know how many doses of vaccine could have been destroyed due to power outages or delivery delays.
– CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report.