President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday criticized the Trump administration’s effort to distribute and administer Covid’s vaccines, saying the government had failed to meet its own goals.
“The Trump administration’s plan to distribute vaccines is lagging far behind,” he told a news conference. “As I have long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should.”
He said his administration “will move heaven and earth” to speed up the distribution and administration of Covid vaccines as soon as he takes office on January 20. He reiterated his administration’s promise to have administered 100 million doses of the vaccine by the hundredth day in office.
To achieve this goal, he said, “it would be necessary to increase the current pace from five to six times to 1 million kicks a day”. He said his team will act more aggressively to increase vaccine administration, but even with 1 million a day, it will take months to vaccinate the majority of the population.
“This will be the biggest operational challenge we have ever faced as a nation,” he added. “We are going to do that. It will require a lot of new effort. It is not yet underway.”
Biden said his government will also invoke the Defense Production Act, a wartime law that allows the president to compel companies to prioritize manufacturing for national security, to ensure that manufacturers have enough materials for vaccine production. He said he would also use the authority to expand the production of personal protective equipment, such as masks.
He added that his administration will “establish vaccination sites and send mobile units to communities that are difficult to access”.
Although more than 11.4 million doses of vaccines were distributed to states on Monday, just over 2.1 million doses were administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency notes that its data may be out of step with the actual number of doses administered as states and jurisdictions report the data.
“A big difference between the number of doses delivered and the number of doses administered is expected at this point in the COVID vaccination program due to several factors, including delays in notification of administered doses, management of vaccine stocks available by jurisdictions and pending release of vaccination through the federal pharmaceutical partnership program for long-term care, “says the agency on its vaccine tracking website.
CDC representatives did not return CNBC’s request for further comment on the disparity between administered doses and distributed doses.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, acknowledged on CNN on Tuesday that the vaccine’s launch was slower than anticipated.
“We are certainly not in the numbers we wanted at the end of December,” he said in an interview with Jim Sciutto. “I believe that as we move into January, we will see an increase in momentum, which, Jim, I hope will allow us to reach the projected pace.”
Michael Pratt, spokesman for Operation Warp Speed, reiterated that the number of doses administered by the CDC is likely to be an under-count due to delays in data reporting.
“Operation Warp Speed continues on its way to having approximately 40 million doses of vaccine and allocating 20 million doses for the first vaccinations by the end of December 2020, with distribution of the 20 million first doses in the first week of January , as states make requests from them, “he said in a statement.
Dr. Atul Gawande, a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory team, said on Tuesday on “CBS This Morning” that the new government does not “have all the information necessary to understand where the bottlenecks are.”
He also noted that he is concerned that the Trump administration is being overly optimistic about the vaccination schedule. Trump’s HHS secretary Alex Azar said the general public should be vaccinated by March.
“I am concerned about the promise of when things will return to normal,” said Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a professor at Harvard University.
He promised that the Biden government will be more transparent about where the problems lie, whether in the manufacture, distribution or administration of the injections.