Warning that vaccines are the country’s only barrier to the rapid spread of new variants of the coronavirus, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on Sunday that federal and state leaders must “restart and adopt a new strategy ”to hit many more shots as quickly as possible.
Speaking of “Face the Nation” on CBS News, Dr. Gottlieb said the 40 million doses currently available can go a long way in protecting the country’s 50 million residents aged 65 and over in particular.
“I think we need to take an approach to all of the above and push it through different channels,” said Gottlieb, “including the big stores, including federal websites that the Biden government is talking about maintaining. We need to try everything now to create multiple distribution points. “
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22.1 million doses were sent to the states by Friday, but only about 6.7 million people received the first of the two necessary doses. This data is delayed from the most recent allocations by at least a few days.
The vaccination rate increased considerably in the past week, after the holiday period ended, and several governors have announced plans to allow a larger group of citizens to receive vaccines. But states that expand the availability of vaccines – announcing that people over 70, for example, can now get the vaccine – are encountering a demand so intense that online registration portals overload and lock up quickly, call lines are flooded and the available supply runs out in a matter of hours.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced on Friday that he would launch almost all available vaccines immediately after taking office on January 20, instead of keeping half of them to ensure that everyone who receives the first dose will also have a second a few weeks later.
Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, said on Sunday that whether doses should be kept was “a really interesting debate” because of concerns over whether production could be increased to get people a second dose in time.
“I just want to make sure that we get as much as possible as soon as possible, without putting people at risk for the second dose,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The Biden team is due to announce this week a plan to raise the vaccination rate, including the installation of federally administered vaccination posts in places like sports stadiums and high school gymnasiums.
But Dr. Gottlieb said pharmacies also need to start offering the vaccine to their customers quickly. Federal officials said last week that they would accelerate the start of a program in which some 40,000 pharmacies will give vaccines to people in high-risk groups, such as the elderly and frontline employees. However, only a few thousand will be involved at the start.
“Many elderly people will not want to go to a stadium to get vaccinated,” said Gottlieb. “They will want to go to a local pharmacy or a doctor’s office. Therefore, we need to provide more opportunities for people to be vaccinated where they feel comfortable doing so. “