The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaks during a press conference at the White House, conducted by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, at the White House James Brady Press Briefing Room on January 21. of 2021 in Washington, DC.
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The winter storm and power outages across Texas pose a “significant” problem for the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine, warned the White House chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on Thursday.
“Well, obviously it’s a problem. In some places, he has been slowed down and is paralyzed,” said Fauci during an interview with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC. “We will only have to make up for it as soon as the weather gets a little better, the ice melts and we get the trucks and people out of there.”
“It is significant when you have that part of the country … which is really immobilized in many ways,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The Biden government is working to accelerate the pace of vaccinations in the U.S., after a slower-than-expected implementation under former President Donald Trump. However, the Texas winter storm is delaying some shipments of Covid-19 vaccines and forcing the temporary closure of vaccination sites.
Nearly half a million Texans are still without power on Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, after the state’s power grid failed to keep up with heat demand during record temperatures, causing more than 4 million outages. Millions of people are still under boiling water warnings, according to The Weather Channel.
Bad weather disrupted service at the FedEx hub in Memphis and caused package delays in the U.S., the company said earlier this week. UPS Worldport’s package hub in Louisville, Kentucky, and another regional hub in Dallas have since reopened after temporarily shutting down Monday night due to the weather.
It is unclear how this will affect the community’s three new vaccination centers, in Dallas, Arlington and Houston, which the Biden government plans to help build. Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden’s Covid czar, told reporters last week that the centers would be operational the week of February 22 and would allow providers to administer more than 10,000 shots a day.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As soon as Texas opens up more roads and residents have uninterrupted power, health care providers will have to comply with twice the vaccination against Covid-19, Fauci said on Thursday.
About 3 million of the approximately 29 million Texans received at least their first dose of the two-dose Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer or Moderna, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 1.2 million of those people have already had their second chance.
Fauci added that he does not know how many doses of vaccine could have been destroyed due to power outages or delivery delays.
– CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report.