President Biden’s chief of staff insisted that the Trump administration’s plan to launch the coronavirus vaccine was non-existent after Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to completely disprove CNN’s much-criticized report that the Biden administration was “starting from scratch” with your vaccine distribution plan.
“I think these two statements are really more reconciled than you can imagine. I think what Dr. Fauci is saying is, of course, a year of really incredible scientific advances and discoveries that created this vaccine in record time,” said the White House chief of staff Ron Klain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program on Sunday. “But the vaccine distribution process, especially outside nursing homes and hospitals for the community as a whole, didn’t really exist when we entered the White House.”
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“The way people get the vaccine is chaotic,” continued Klain. “It is very limited. We have seen this factor across the country, where millions of doses have been distributed. About half of that has been distributed. Therefore, the process of putting the vaccine in the arms is the difficult process. That is where we are late. as a country and that’s where we’re focused on the Biden government in getting that to happen. “
Klain added that “the fundamental difference between Biden’s approach and Trump’s approach is that we will take responsibility in the federal government.”
“We are going to take on this problem,” he said. “We are going to work closely with the states. They are key partners in doing this. But we are also going to do the job ourselves. We will create these federal vaccination centers to ensure that in states that do not have enough vaccination sites, we fill these gaps. “
Rev. Tina Findley (L) prepares to receive her injection while Pastor Timothy Findley Jr. (R) receives his Modern vaccine at the Louisville Urban League on January 20, 2021 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by Jon Cherry / Getty Images)
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Klain also emphasized the new government’s goal of getting 100 million coronavirus vaccinations administered in Biden’s first 100 days.
More than 41 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine have been distributed and more than 20 million have been administered by Saturday, according to the CDC vaccine tracker.
Biden’s new CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, also criticized the Trump administration during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday”.
“I would say that one of the biggest problems now is that I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have, and if I can’t tell you, then I can’t tell the governors and I can’t tell the state health officials,” said Walensky . “If they don’t know how much vaccine they are getting, not just this week, but the next week and the week after, they can’t plan.”
“The fact that we don’t know today, five days after this administration and weeks of planning, how much vaccine we have just gives you a sense of the challenges that remain,” she continued.
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On Thursday, CNN quoted unidentified Biden employees as saying that “[t]there is nothing to redo here, “that they” will have to build everything from scratch “and that the new administration would have to start from” square one “.
“We are certainly not starting from scratch, because there is activity going on in distribution,” Fauci said in response to the White House press conference report on Thursday.
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Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, accepted the role of Biden’s chief medical advisor before taking office.
Joseph A. Wulfsohn of Fox News contributed to this report.