“Come on, give me a break, man,” President Biden told a reporter on Thursday when asked if his goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days is very modest. “It is a good start, 100 million.” Biden was right when he said that “he made that promise for the first time, it was an ambitious goal”, PoliticalRenuka Rayasam writes. “But now it is only a modest increase in the rate of vaccinations he has inherited,” and experts agree that it will no longer be sufficient.
“At a rate of 1 million doses a day, the virus would not be contained until sometime in 2022,” Political reports. Peter Hotez, a vaccine specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, said the United States needs to vaccinate 2 to 3 million people a day to end the pandemic by September, and the sooner the better, due to the emergence of new, more contagious variants. “We waste all other opportunities,” said Hotez. “That’s all we have left.”
“I love that he set a goal, but a million doses a day?” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, said The New York Times. “I think we can do better” and, in fact, “we will have to do it if we really want to get over this virus, say, in the summer.”
Currently, US vaccination efforts are limited by the scarcity of supplies and inefficient distribution of the two approved vaccines, Modern and Pfizer / BioNTech. “Pfizer and Moderna vaccine doses are expected to end in the United States in a few days” Political says. But both companies are increasing production, and Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine is expected to hit shelves in late February, so there must be ample supplies to significantly exceed Biden’s current target by April.
In the meantime, the Biden administration must focus “on fixing the mess of state and local vaccination centers that have proved unable to manage even the current flow of vaccines,” the Times reports, citing experts. Biden has asked for $ 20 billion to expand vaccination centers widely and wants to hire 100,000 health professionals to administer the vaccines. If he can do that, former FDA director Dr. Mark McClellan told the Times, should “push the number beyond a million doses a day and probably far beyond.”
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