America’s leading infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, asked the federal government on Thursday to use more resources to vaccinate Americans after the country missed its goal of inoculating 20 million people by the end of the year.
“We would like to see everything working perfectly and have 20 million doses in people today, at the end of 2020, which was the projection,” said Fauci.
“Obviously it didn’t, and it’s disappointing,” he told NBC in an interview.
The US’s failure to meet its vaccine distribution target later in the year comes as concerns over the newly identified strain of Covid-19 circulating in the United Kingdom, which was reported to have arrived in the US this week, with cases in Colorado and California.
More than 14 million doses of vaccine have been distributed in the United States, but only 2.1 million people have been vaccinated, leaders of the federal vaccine program, Operation Warp Speed, said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Operation Warp Speed chief adviser Moncef Slaoui said: “We know it should be better and we are working hard to make it better.”
The figure of 2.1 million is probably an underestimate because of delays in reporting. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Wednesday that 2.6 million people received their first dose.
Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), said that in order to accelerate the distribution of the vaccine, the federal government needs to provide more resources to local governments in charge of administering the vaccine.
“That is, the states, the cities, the counties, the places where the vaccine is actually going into people’s arms,” said Fauci. “We have to support local groups, states and cities to help them do this.”
The United States recorded 19.7 million registered cases of Covid-19 and more than 342,400 people died from the infection, according to Johns Hopkins University.
December has been the country’s most lethal month since the pandemic began in early 2020, and health officials have warned that January could be worse.
Fauci said it was “inevitable” that the new variant, called B.1.1.7, would reach the United States due to the high level of infections in the country.
He said that while it is worrying that the new variant is more efficient in spreading from person to person, it has shown no signs of being more harmful and has shown no ability to escape the protection of the vaccines in use. “The good news is that it doesn’t seem to be more virulent, making people sicker and causing more deaths,” said Fauci.
The new variant was identified in a Colorado man in his 20s who worked as a member of the national guard supporting a nursing home. He had no travel history, according to the state health department.
Although the new variant was not found in the United States until this week, the CDC said it was probably already circulating in the country. The agency said it did not identify the variant in its sequencing efforts, but its laboratories have access to only part of the country’s Covid-19 boxes and may not have detected it yet.
The United States recorded more cases and deaths from coronavirus than any other country. On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden criticized the Trump administration’s vaccine distribution efforts.
“A few weeks ago, the Trump administration suggested that 20 million Americans could be vaccinated by the end of December,” said Biden. “With only a few days left in December, we’ve vaccinated just a few million so far.”
Fauci said he was hopeful that the distribution of the vaccine will increase in the first weeks of January.
“Hopefully, as we look at 2021, as we enter the year, with a combination of vaccines and adequate adherence to public health measures, we can end this and crush it, just as we did with other outbreaks like polio and measles and other important infectious diseases, ”said Fauci. “So that is the goal and we hope that we can achieve it.”