President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid Advisory Board member, Dr. Celine Gounder, criticized the Trump administration’s fragmented response from the Trump administration as some U.S. states struggle to get the vaccine doses they need.
“I think we’ve already had a very patchwork response in every state,” said Gounder in an interview Monday night on “The News with Shepard Smith.”
At a coronavirus briefing on Friday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the federal government is sending his state 50,000 fewer doses of the vaccine than it did the week before. The state was receiving fewer doses as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded the vaccine’s eligibility to anyone over 65 on January 12.
On Monday, Cuomo sent a letter to Pfizer asking whether the state of New York could buy vaccines directly from the company. Last week, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer made a similar request to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
Gounder told presenter Shepard Smith that this approach can cause more problems than it solves.
“I think Governor Cuomo himself said in the spring that the situation around the fans was essentially ‘a big Ebay’ with all the states competing against each other for fans, and I think this kind of approach to vaccine delivery is it will result, frankly, in the same kind of situation that he himself was criticizing last spring, “said Gounder.
CDC data shows that the US is averaging about 900,000 vaccinations a day. During an interview with Fox News, Azar quoted the CDC number and criticized the Biden government’s goal of “100 million shots in the first 100 days”.
“We will have distributed 250 million doses of the vaccine by the end of April,” said Azar. “If they have only done 100 million vaccinations so far, it will be a tragic waste of the opportunity we have given them.”
NYU epidemiologist Gounder qualified Azar’s statement, noting that the distribution did not mean actual injections of the vaccine.
“We saw, however, that the distribution is very different from receiving gunshots, that the last kilometer of delivery is really the most difficult part here,” explained Gounder. “Secondly, we still have to confirm that this number of doses, that number of 250 million that he is quoting there, will really work.”
Cuomo, in a separate letter to Azar, criticized him for “confusing” the public about vaccine stocks. Azar admitted on Friday that no stock currently exists.
Biden’s adviser, Dr. Michael Osterholm, warned that the worst of the Covid pandemic is yet to come, and the data confirm his bleak prediction. The United States is rapidly approaching 400,000 deaths in the pandemic, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. This is equivalent to about one in 822 Americans. For 19 consecutive days, there were at least 23,000 people in ICUs due to Covid in the USA, according to the Covid Tracking Project. HHS reported that almost 80% of ICU beds are occupied across the country.
Gounder said the United States is at “our fifth peak now” and that the next few months will be about “layered protections” to avoid another.
“We really have to double up on things like masking and social detachment, outdoor spaces rather than indoor, well-ventilated spaces,” warned Gounder. “If we do these things, then yes, this may be our last peak, but it really depends on each of us doing what needs to be done to get back to normal life.”