WASHINGTON – The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Sunday that the federal government does not know how many coronavirus vaccines the nation has, a complication that adds to the already Herculean task ahead of the Biden administration.
“I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have and if I can’t tell you, I can’t tell the governors and I can’t tell the state health officials,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told Fox. News Sunday ”.
“If I don’t know how many vaccines I get not only this week, but also next week and next week, I can’t plan. I can’t figure out how many sites they will launch, I can’t figure out how many vaccinations they need and they can’t give figure out how many appointments they have to make for the public, “Walensky said.
In a poll with the Trump administration, Walensky said the lack of knowledge about vaccine delivery is indicative of “the challenges we are left with.”
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President Joe Biden has set a goal of administering 100 million Covid-19 vaccines in its first 100 days. The Biden administration has repeatedly insisted that the target is sufficiently ambitious, given the severity of the pandemic.
Walensky acknowledged that the US needs to vaccinate people faster, but said the nation is facing supply constraints. Production will increase after the first 100 days, Walensky said, and the planned introduction of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will also help ease supply problems.
“We really hope that we will have more vaccines and that the rate at which we can get vaccinated will increase,” Walensky said.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain said the nation was also facing distribution problems because the Trump administration, which began the program, did not have a clear plan.
“The process of distributing the vaccine, especially outside of nursing homes and hospitals, to the community as a whole did not really exist when we entered the White House,” Klain told MSNBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
“So the process of getting the vaccine in arms, this is the difficult process, there we are behind as a country and there we are focused on the Biden administration to make this happen,” he added.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical officer who served in the Trump administration, said Sunday that Biden’s goal of 100 million doses in 100 days is not a final number.
“It’s really a floor, not a ceiling,” Fauci told CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “It will be a challenge. I think a reasonable goal has been set. We always want to do better than the goal you have set.”
These 100 million injections will cover about 67 million people, Fauci said, some of whom will receive the required two doses, while others will receive a single dose. To date, the United States has administered nearly 22 million doses, well below federal targets.
The need to vaccinate as many people as possible has taken on a new urgency as the coronavirus moves. Fauci said Covid-19 vaccines currently on the market may not be as effective against the new strains.
The general election of Biden’s surgeon stressed on Sunday that the United States is in a race to adapt to the new variants.
“The virus basically tells us that it will continue to change and that we need to be prepared for that,” Dr. Vivek Murthy said in an interview with ABC News this week.
“So the bottom line is that we’re in a race against these variants, the virus will change and it’s up to us to adapt and make sure we stay ahead,” Murthy said.
When asked if the US is in a race against time before a Covid variant that makes vaccines ineffective, Walensky said Americans should be inoculated when given the opportunity and adhere to mitigation strategies to deny the possibility that the virus to circulate.
“I’d say I’ve been in a race all along,” Walensky said. “The more viruses there are, the more viruses they reproduce, the more likely we are to have mutations and variants.”