While more contagious variants are spreading across the United States, leading health officials expressed optimism on Sunday that both vaccine supply and vaccination rates will steadily increase.
“Demand clearly outpaces supply now,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious physician, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.
“I can say that things will get better as we move from February to March, to April, because the number of vaccine doses that will be available will increase substantially.”
The number of injections administered daily in the United States has recently increased. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 2.2 million doses were administered on Saturday and 1.6 million on Friday. That raised the average for the past seven days to 1.4 million a day, which comes close to President Biden’s new target of 1.5 million shots a day.
In addition, the supply of vaccines – although still well below demand – is growing. Federal authorities recently increased shipments to the states to 10.5 million doses a week, as Moderna and Pfizer gradually increased production. The two companies have agreements to provide the United States with 400 million combined doses – enough to vaccinate 200 million people – by the summer.
Pfizer said recently that it will deliver its doses two months ahead of schedule in May, partly because it is now counting an additional dose on each bottle it is making. And Moderna is considering a production change that will allow it to increase the number of doses in its bottles from 10 to 15.
Authorities are also counting on the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a single dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson later this month. Although this company initially supplies the United States with only a few million doses, it is expected to increase production considerably by April. Other vaccines from Novavax and AstraZeneca may also be authorized for use in the United States in the spring, further increasing the supply.
Authorities are rushing to vaccinate as many people as possible in order to overcome the most contagious variants of the virus that were first identified in Britain and South Africa. The British variant, known as B.1.1 .7, is spreading rapidly in the United States, with its prevalence doubling approximately every 10 days, according to a new study. The CDC said it could become the dominant form of the virus in the United States in March.
Although this variant is worrisome because it is more transmissible than previous variants, vaccine developers are more concerned with a variant discovered in South Africa, known as B.1.351, because it appears to make current vaccines less effective. Several manufacturers said they were solving the problem by developing new versions of their vaccines, which could act as booster doses. The Food and Drug Administration said it is working on a plan to allow these new versions of vaccines to be authorized.
Developers of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the University of Oxford said on Sunday that they hoped to have a modified version of their vaccine available by autumn.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation” program, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and board member of Pfizer, said on Sunday that he believed it would be possible to develop a booster that “is based on many of the different variations that we are seeing. ”
“I think there is a reasonable chance that we will be able to stay ahead of this virus,” he said.