WASHINGTON (AP) – It seemed so ambitious at first: 100 million vaccines in 100 days.
Now, after a month of his presidency, Joe Biden is on a sliding path to achieving that goal and launching himself beyond it on the far more ambitious and frightening mission of vaccinating all eligible adults against the coronavirus until the end of the summer.
Limited offer of the two approved COVID-19 vaccines has hampered the pace of vaccinations – and that was before the extreme winter delayed delivery about 6 million doses last week. But the United States is on the verge of a breakthrough in supply, as manufacturing increases and a third vaccine is expected will be available in the coming weeks.
This means that the act of giving injections will soon be the dominant constraint, and is driving the Biden government to push to dramatically expand the universe of those who will administer injections and where Americans will find them to take their injections.
“It’s one thing to have the vaccine and it’s very different to put it in someone’s arms,” said Biden on Friday, while visiting the Pfizer factory in Portage, Michigan. The company is expected to double its pace of vaccine delivery in the coming weeks.
Since its approval in December, more than 75 million doses of the modern and Pfizer two-dose vaccines have been distributed, of which 63 million have been injected, reaching 13% of Americans. Nearly 45 million of those doses have been administered since Biden’s inauguration on January 20.
The pace of delivery of these vaccines is about to take off. About 145 million doses are scheduled for delivery in the next 5 1/2 weeks, with an additional 200 million expected by the end of May and another 200 million by the end of July.
This was before the early approval by the Food and Drug Administration for the emergency use of a third vaccine, by Johnson & Johnson. The single-dose J&J vaccine is expected to help accelerate the path to immunity and requires half the vaccination resources of the two-dose regimens. But there is not a large stock of J&J doses ready to be launched on the first day.
“Let’s start with just a few million in stock,” said Jeff Zients, coordinator of the White House’s COVID-19, last week. Still, when combined with predicted increases in other vaccines, doses of J&J can prove to be a fundamental advance in delivering enough vaccines for almost all American adults by the end of June, at least a month ahead of schedule.
The average daily inoculation rose to 1.7 million injections per day last week, but it is expected that twice that number will be available on average every day. The focus of Biden’s team is now shifting rapidly to ensure that these doses can be used, although the government has resisted calls from some health experts to publicly set a “moon-shot” goal for how many daily doses it expects to administer.
Biden first set his goal of 100 million doses in 100 days on December 8, days before the first vaccines received emergency use authorization. On Inauguration Day, it was clear that the United States was on track to achieve that goal.
Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and professor of public health at George Washington University, said she would like to see the government commit to a more ambitious goal of 3 million vaccines a day.
“I want to see them put that stake in the ground and ask everyone to help them achieve that goal,” she said.
The current rate of vaccination has dropped sharply in the past few days, as winter weather closed administration sites in Texas and across the south, and icy conditions prevented supplies at transportation centers in Louisville, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee .
A third of the missed doses have already been delivered, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, announced on Sunday. The White House predicts that the remaining postponed doses will be injected until March 1 and that the daily rate of vaccination will continue to rise.
Much of the increase, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comes from people who received their second dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. The pace of first dose vaccinations, however, has been quite stable in recent weeks, hovering around an average of 900,000 vaccines per day.
Increasing the rate of first dose administrations and the overall vaccination rate will be the key to achieving herd immunity – estimated to require vaccination of around 80% of the population – in the hope of ending the pandemic and reducing the spread of disease. potentially even more dangerous “mutant” strains of the coronavirus.
This means keeping demand high. Management expressed concern about public research showing that tens of millions of Americans are reluctant to receive the vaccine and is stepping up the public reach to overcome this hesitation, as the death toll in the U.S. approaches 500,000 – “a terribly historic milestone in the history of this country”, as I said Fauci, and “we are not done yet”.
Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, director of data for COVID-19 at the White House, said in an interview that the government is “focused on going to communities and making sure people know that these vaccines are safe and how they can get them, with the goal of vaccinating almost all Americans ”.
Management has also turned its focus to identifying new routes for delivering vaccines in addition to those already used by states, including federally administered mass vaccination sites, smaller community health centers and retail pharmacies. The White House’s goal is to defend the sites now so that they are ready to deal with the flow of vaccines in the coming weeks.
“They can send a lot more volume through these channels, through these big stores, through community health centers,” Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner for the Trump administration, told MSNBC on Friday. He praised the Biden government for creating these locations in advance.
The Pentagon, at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, began sending thousands of active duty troops to open mass vaccination centers across the country, with plans in place for up to 100 locations capable of delivering 450,000 doses per day. The first of these facilities opened last week in California, with units in Texas and New York scheduled to open in the coming days.
“We have always known along the way that we would have to provide sites with predominantly federal support,” said FEMA acting administrator Robert Fenton last week, describing the initial sites as a “pilot” for further deployment. “They will continue to grow as the offering is incorporated.”
The government also launched the federal pharmacy program that had initially been announced by Trump’s White House. He delivered doses directly to chains like CVS and Walgreens, leveraging existing supply chains for injections like the flu vaccine.
Governors, along with the CDC, have identified specific retail chains to begin administering vaccines in their states, with the aim of reaching underserved communities and also testing the ability of pharmacies to increase injections.
In its first four days of operation, with about 15% of pharmacies across the country participating, the pharmacy program administered more than 700,000 of the 1 million starting doses per week distributed by the federal government. This prompted the White House to rapidly double to 2 million doses next week.
Additional increases are likely, as the White House monitors pharmacies’ ability to deliver injections. The National Association of Chain Drug Stores estimates that only its members have the capacity to deliver more than 3 million doses a day.
Additional federal channels for vaccine delivery have attracted some complaints from governors who want even more vaccines to flow through their state allocations. That number rose from less than 9 million doses a week to 13.5 million in Biden’s first weeks in office.
“Everyone wants more vaccines,” said Governor Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., “I know that the continued increase is great news for all of us.”
“The more ways we can bring opportunities online, the better,” she added.