Day of 4 million vaccines signals a major turnaround for the US

Photographer: Mark Kauzlarich / Bloomberg

Landscape architect Scheri Fultineer came out of the white vaccination booth at Massachusetts General Hospital with a band-aid on his shoulder and a sense of joy at being so easy. “At the beginning of the year,” she said, “I was not optimistic.”

In mid-February, as eligibility expanded for everyone aged 65 and over, the state’s registration site failed, making Governor Charlie Baker so enraged that he publicly exhaled, “My hair is on fire.”

Across the United States, those stumbling blocks outside the gate have been corrected and a few more. The Massachusetts vaccination effort is advancing so rapidly that almost 38% of residents have received at least one dose, and the new massive system for injecting vaccines into arms has immense capacity.

“We could double our vaccination rate without much effort,” said Paul Biddinger, a doctor and chairman of the state’s vaccine advisory committee.

Almost half of the US states had opened the vaccination to all people aged 16 and over at the end of last week. This will increase to 36 by the end of this week. All 50 have now pledged to open eligibility for all adults by May 1, President Joe Biden’s goal. The government will now speed up this reference to April 19, said a White House official on Tuesday morning, asking to remain anonymous before the announcement.

Across the country, vaccinations reached a seven-day average of more than 3 million a day over the past weekend, and the country registered 4 million vaccines on Saturday. (On Monday, the daily vaccination count plummeted to 2.1 million, but the drop was an anomaly expected after a holiday weekend.)

“A huge turnaround,” tweeted medical researcher and author Eric Topol. “Who would have guessed that the same country that couldn’t even run a COVID test that works for two months and could scale more than 4 million people in one day?”

More than 100 million Americans received at least one dose, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly a third of the population. Daily fees are expected to rise even further as vaccine manufacturers deliver the promised 700 million doses by the end of July.

The limit for herd immunity is estimated at about three quarters of the population; at the current rate, it could be achieved in three months, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker.

The pace has been accelerating in recent weeks. This winter, the country took five weeks to move from an average of 1 million daily injections to 2 million injections, hampered by limited supplies and bad weather. It took just four weeks to reach the current average of more than 3 million shots a day.

It remains to be seen whether the vaccination campaign can overcome new variants of the virus, but it is running.

In New York City, more than 450 vaccination sites are spread across the five districts, an infrastructure so extensive that the city can inoculate half a million people a week if it has the supply. The venues – including a network of clinics and 24-hour centers, not to mention Yankee Stadium – are so numerous that they have attracted many vaccine candidates from outside the city.

In Washington state, childbirth is going so well that eligibility will be open to the general population over 16 in mid-April, two weeks ahead of what was originally planned.

And in Los Angeles, Andrew Friedman, a resident who created an alert service that gives Twitter followers updates on when and where they can take pictures, said he saw sites with available hours rise from just a few to 37 on a recent day.

That represented thousands of possible vacancies at a time when Los Angeles County was expanding its availability to 50 or more on Thursday, and to anyone aged 16 and over on April 15. “It is much easier to get a compromise,” said Friedman. “A lot more doses are coming out, and it is getting a lot smoother.”

So, after some initial efforts went awkwardly wrong, what is working now?

First, “we have the vaccine supply flowing through the system,” said Robert Huckman, chairman of the Health Care Initiative faculty. Harvard Business School. “This is probably the biggest driver of our ability to expand the number of shots fired each day.”

The next most important factor, said Huckman, is the addition of many more places to take pictures, including “larger channels”. Massachusetts, for example, has seven mass vaccination sites, including Gillette Stadium, where the New England Patriots play football.

“Massachusetts adopted mass vaccination early,” said Tim Rowe, executive director of CIC Health, which manages these megasites. His parent company, paralyzed by the pandemic, applied his experience in developing real estate for technology and biotechnology companies to set up spaces, he said.

“We were the kids on the block who had the time and experience,” from logistics to licensing and handling visitors, said Rowe. “These are basic things that you have to do well.”

Vigorous efforts across the country to build mass vaccine sites produced some initial failures, said Rowe, but “that was the learning curve.”

In Texas, 28% of the population received at least one dose, close to the national rate, and the state received a supply of 2.5 million doses this week, the highest ever.

Massachusetts megasites fired more than half a million shots. Combined hospitals and pharmacies have given more than three times as much, the latest state data show.

“Hospitals have actually made a ton of vaccines,” said Biddinger of the advisory board. “We are very lucky to have an extraordinary health infrastructure.”

Community health centers and local health departments are also helping. And when it comes to helping people sign up for vaccines, even private individuals have contributed – guiding individuals on sign-ups or creating do-it-yourself software tools to take a slot.

‘Late,’ Variants

For now, the demand for vaccines remains greater than the supply. But “at some point in the next two months, the supply will be greater than the demand,” said Biddinger, and that is what he is most concerned about.

It would be great if at least 60% of the population could be vaccinated before “we really start attacking the bushes,” he said. “But to reach more than 70 or 80 Percent it’s gonna be hard. And we really have to understand the reasons for everyone’s hesitation, and we have to be able to face and overcome them. “

Recent surveys show growing acceptance of vaccines in the U.S.: 75% are willing to get the vaccines, up from 67% at the end of January, according to AP-NORC voting.

“What about that last quarter?” said Rowe of CIC Health. “There is a lot of work being done to think about latecomers.”

States have also stepped up efforts for equality, he said, trying to provide more access to underprivileged neighborhoods. On average, states vaccinated more than a quarter of their white populations, but only about 1 in 7 black people and 1 in 8 Hispanic residents, according to demographics Bloomberg analysis.

This week, a new The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s megasite at a convention complex in downtown Boston is scheduled to give 7,000 injections per day, especially to people from nearby black communities.

New York City officials said they would step up vaccination in minority and immigrant neighborhoods, although gaps still exist. For example, blacks make up 24% of the city’s population, but 20% of those vaccinated with at least one injection.

Even with vaccine numbers rise, so do the cases of more contagious variants. At UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, most cases of Covid-19 currently involve a new strain, epidemiologist Richard Ellison told Bloomberg Radio.

As accountant Laureen Sava left the Massachusetts General’s vaccination tent in Boston, she said she was feeling as if the state and country were ahead of the curve, that: “We are going to beat any variant out there. “

She “is not a Democrat,” she said, but the current administration’s push for vaccination inspires confidence to the point that she has a promising new slogan: “Travel 2022”.

– With the help of Christopher Palmeri, Angelica LaVito, Dina Bass, Catarina Saraiva and Henry Goldman

(Updates with the April 19 eligibility target in the fifth paragraph)