For the new administration, a lot has gone well. They closed new deals with existing vaccine suppliers, with promising new vaccine candidates still on the horizon. They achieved in weeks what the Trump administration has not achieved for months: giving states a clear estimate of how many doses of vaccine they will receive. And they invested federal resources in creating large-scale vaccination sites.
But the authorities are aware that they are in a critical period.
“It’s a daunting challenge. I think we are making progress every day,” Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House’s Covid-19 response team, told CNN.
Management is aware of the depth of the hole from which they are digging.
“In terms of what we inherited, you play the hand you have, not the hand you would like to have,” said Slavitt.
Part of the success so far is due to time, as vaccine makers have picked up their pace and states have alleviated distribution problems – a reminder that Biden has limited control over what happens next.
“I don’t think you see many people dancing in the halls,” said a Biden government official involved in the discussions. “It is not that kind of moment.”
“In every direction I can see, where they have a movement, they are doing it,” said Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety, of the Biden government’s progress so far.
“It is really remarkable what the Biden government has been able to do,” said Toner. “But these are problems that will take months to resolve.”
A former Trump administration official involved in the response to the coronavirus said that Biden’s team is benefiting from the groundwork established under former President Donald Trump.
“Everything they’ve done so far has literally been marching through the Warp Speed manual,” said the former Trump administration official, referring to Operation Warp Speed’s effort to develop, manufacture and distribute vaccines. “This is all a boost to the work of the Trump administration.”
Variants of ‘monster’
An item totally out of the president’s control is the emergence of new variants – first detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil – in the United States. This changed the pandemic in a “different ball game” for the Biden government, said a government official.
The authorities recognize that “it is a major threat” that will represent setbacks for even their most elaborate response plans. “I think that’s the reality,” said the government official.
But while the Biden administration is running out of time to anticipate the spread of coronavirus variants that are emerging in the United States, even its top health officials admit that there is not enough vaccine to stay ahead of more transmissible strains like the one initially identified in the United Kingdom. .
“What worries me most about these variants is that we don’t have a robust national system for tracking these variants as they spread across the United States,” said Rick Bright, a former scientist in the United States Department of Health and Human Services. the Trump administration and a former Biden health advisor during the transition, said on CNN this week. “We are already concerned that these viruses can spread more quickly, more easily. This will translate into more deaths.”
Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president at Scripps Research, said the government should be more aggressive in increasing surveillance of the variants and encouraging Americans to wear protective masks.
“It is a monster,” said Topol, particularly about the most communicable strain in the UK, “and we will not be able to avoid it.”
Biden government officials have come to practically beg Americans to mask, keep their distance and get vaccinated as soon as they can.
“When a vaccine is available to you, get vaccinated,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci in a recent interview with government health experts. “You will be taking a big step in a positive way to protect the community.”
Gun shots: ‘How fast can we move?’
For the president, there is perhaps no more pressing issue than how quickly Americans can be vaccinated.
Biden often peppered his team with questions like, “How fast can we move?” said an administration official.
Therefore, the Biden coronavirus team started with a bang. They quickly informed states that their weekly vaccine allocations would increase by 20% and providers would receive specialized syringes to draw every last drop of vaccine vials.
From then on, it was as if Biden’s team were simply checking the list of items that health experts have been demanding for months.
In the short term, they will use the same legal power to help Pfizer obtain supplies and equipment to make the most of his vaccine. They are already considering measures to use it to accelerate the production of the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine, which is pending emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
They are the type of procedure that health experts do, even if they don’t produce new vaccines right away.
“As the old saying goes, the hardest part of making vaccines is making vaccines,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. “It’s not like making men’s shirts.”
Good vaccines and bad data
Experts believe that this is partly due to the measures taken by the Biden government, but also because governors and health professionals had a few months to resolve the process.
When Arkansas Secretary of Health Dr. José Romero noticed his state ranking almost the last in an article on administered injections, he was stunned.
“I thought we were doing a good job,” said Romero, who is also chairman of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices. “My stomach dropped in my shoes and I said, ‘What the hell?'”
Romero realized that his files were not going to the right place for CDC to capture his data. After a call with the CDC, he clarified the problem. After ending the confusion, Arkansas ranks 11th out of 50 states for the portion of the population that received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to data from the CDC.
“Other states are having trouble getting their data to and from different locations,” said Romero. “This is going to be a challenge.”
That’s the kind of tangled mess that Biden’s team spent its first week unfolding. They sought out governors, state health officials and local officials to try to understand why the gulf existed between administered and administered vaccines.
Since then, they have encouraged providers to act quickly to put the first doses into people’s arms. But they also found that many states still have an accumulation of second doses – stocks that accumulated in the early days of the distribution effort, when suppliers struggled to complete vaccinations quickly. Other states are still accumulating doses, unsure whether these new vaccine projections are reliable.
“It’s not like pushing a button,” said a White House official about getting states and healthcare providers to quickly manage their remaining inventory. “I think we expect the pace to increase.”
While the system for tracking doses once they reach the states remains woefully non-existent, state officials hope that Biden’s team will try to improve existing systems, rather than creating another one.
State and federal officials are also beginning to realize that the price of rapid vaccinations can be fair.
“At the moment, if you want to be vaccinated, what matters is how experienced you are with consultation systems and what kind of influence you have,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, medical director of the Association of Territorial Health Officers and State. “Is it just about the speed of vaccinations or do we want to make sure that we’re really being meticulous?”
Early vaccine distribution data revealed that race and ethnicity data are not being collected often enough. Available data showed that those who were vaccinated in the first waves were more likely to be white. And studies show that many black Americans still hesitate to be vaccinated.
Inequality in vaccine administration is the kind of thing that keeps Biden’s advisers up at night, officials said.
“I think there are many people calling for the vaccine and many people are going to be called for,” said a government official.
CNJ’s MJ Lee, Jeremy Diamond and Deidre McPhillips contributed to this story.