Biden is also set to launch a billion-dollar national advertising campaign aimed at convincing the majority of Americans to get vaccinated, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. The campaign would include a series of awareness initiatives, in addition to paid media, in an attempt to sell the mass vaccination effort to the public.
“We are in a race against time,” a senior Biden transition officer told reporters on a conference call on Thursday. “We need these resources to vaccinate the vast majority of Americans to help us leave Covid behind and reopen our schools, businesses and, once again, we can get together with our friends and family.”
Biden promised to administer 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days in office, an ambitious goal that will require the next government to significantly accelerate the pace of vaccinations after a difficult initial implementation.
Still, the plan depends on convincing a divided and shaken Congress to quickly approve tens of billions more dollars for the effort. State and federal officials are also already facing a litany of challenges, including widespread confusion among Americans about who is eligible and where to get the vaccines – as well as pockets of vaccine hesitation.
“A national communication plan is lacking – lack of understanding of what the plan is,” said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Immunization Managers Association, of the deployment efforts under the Trump administration.
Some states complained on Friday that while the Trump administration promised to release the entire vaccine in federal reserves to speed up immunizations, there was, in fact, nothing left.
“This is a nationwide mistake,” tweeted Oregon Democratic governor Kate Brown, who said Operation Warp Speed’s chief operating officer, General Gustave Perna, directly informed her that the reserves were dry, despite claims that half of the supplies were being kept for a second dose under the two-dose Covid regimens.
The disclosure surprised Biden’s transition, which was only discovered on Friday.
“It is another example of an endless example of surprises and disregard for the execution of the plans,” said a person close to the transition.
A Trump administration official said the reserve was opened to the states this week, making 13 million total doses available. With government supplies now reflecting what is available from manufacturers, states are learning that there are limits to how many people can get their first shots. “I think some states thought there would be a big increase in the first dose,” said the official.
Biden had already announced a plan to release all reserves from the second shot to aid in his 100 million shot goal.
Biden’s plan for an advertising campaign will need to be covered at least in part by new funding from Congress, said a person familiar with the matter.
States say they need far more resources and federal guidance as they struggle to get gunshots. The Trump administration abruptly changed its vaccine launch plans earlier this week, urging states to give vaccines to older adults and those with high-risk medical conditions and punishing states that did not run out of vaccines. This angered some governors, including Arkansas Republican Asa Hutchinson, who warned that the change in vaccine distribution would hurt rural states.
A source close to Biden said that undoing some of the new guidelines is “on the table”.
But Biden’s team has signaled that it will not reverse all the changes the Trump administration has made this week, such as opening the vaccine’s eligibility to broader categories of people, even while supplies remain in short supply.
“Some of the guidelines that the CDC and ACIP have released – although very well intentioned in terms of trying to prevent disease and death and doing it fairly – have been very difficult to operationalize on the ground,” said Celine Gounder, member of Covid’s Biden -19 advisory board and an epidemiologist at New York University. “We essentially need to make things simpler.”
Some public health leaders have expressed fears that allowing all older people to have access to the vaccine can now exacerbate the racial disparities already seen in the implementation and leave behind low-income people and essential workers.
But Gounder and others involved said the team is looking for ways other than to control the vaccine’s prioritization categories to ensure that whiter, wealthier residents don’t skip all available consultations.
“Vaccination sites need to be located in the most vulnerable communities, and vaccine providers need to be located in those communities,” she said. “It is a way of creating jobs and creating community support in another way.”
Three people familiar with the plan also told POLITICO that Biden’s team plan does not include specific provisions to prevent people from getting in line and being given a chance before it is officially their turn, noting that any attempt to prevent the linear jump can further delay a release that is already plagued by delays.
“This is not really our focus now – our focus is to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible so that we can have a real impact on public health,” said Gounder. “It is simply unreasonable to expect public health officials at the scene to be doing this type of policing of people and whether they should get the vaccine now or not.”
“Nobody wants to see people skipping the lines and the rich getting there first,” added a person close to Biden. “But these problems can be solved if you get a substantial supply. Our most important task is to configure the supply chain up and down the system to seamlessly move from production to distribution for effective and equitable management. If you do this well, many of these other problems will be resolved. “
TJ Ducklo, a spokesman for the transition, said the Trump administration’s pandemic strategy, which “prioritizes the well-connected and those at the top, while the hardest hit cannot get the help they need” will be reviewed.
Rachel Roubein contributed to this report.