WASHINGTON – Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the country’s leading public health consultants, said on Sunday that the United States should still proceed with its plan to give people the two doses of Covid-19 vaccines currently available, even as some health officials. Health officials suggested that the priority should be to give the first doses to as many people as possible.
There are disagreements among some experts on how to proceed amid supply shortages and new variants that may become more resistant to current vaccines or an increase in infections. Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who advised President Joe Biden’s transition team on the pandemic, said in last week’s “Meet the Press” that he believed that prioritizing more first doses would put the country on a better path ahead of a possible one. further increase. he compared it to a “hurricane”.
But Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Meet the Press on Sunday that he did not believe the science was clear yet on the subject, and that studying whether that path could be better would take a long time.
“What we have now, and what we must follow, is the scientific data that we have accumulated. And it’s really solid, ”said Fauci.
“You can do both, you can get so many people on the first dose at the same time that you adhere, within reason, to the second dose schedule. It would be great to have the study, but I don’t think we could do it in time. “
There has been a decline in daily coronavirus cases and new deaths, according to an analysis by NBC News, in the past few days, after a post-holiday peak. It has been almost three weeks since the new number of daily cases reached 200,000. But while new daily deaths have declined overall, this decline has been slower than the decline in cases.
America’s vaccination rate has steadily increased since the vaccines were first approved in December. While the pace is accelerating, the distribution and administration of vaccines have suffered from their share of setbacks, and Fauci admitted that there is still much more demand than supply.
Fauci said he expects the rate of vaccination to continue to increase thanks to an increase in the supply of vaccines currently available, as well as new vaccines such as that from Johnson & Johnson, which is requesting authorization for emergency use from the Food and Drug Administration.
“If you look at the escalation of dose availability purely based on skill and manufacturing capacity, it will increase and continue to increase as we move from February to March, April and beyond. Even if there is a clear and clear discrepancy between demand and supply, it will improve, ”he said.
Although Fauci said that some measures could have been taken earlier to alleviate the problems, he admitted that it was “a little inevitable” anyway.
“With all due respect and fairness, it is a little inevitable. Certainly, I think, we could have made a little more aggressive contracts with companies to get more doses, but now we have it. These are the contractual arrangements, they are getting out of line as soon as possible, ”he said.
“Things will continue to improve.”