More than 2.1 million Americans received the first greedy shot

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the United States administered 2,127,143 first doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the country on Monday morning and distributed 11,445,175 doses.

The count of vaccine doses distributed and the number of people who received the first dose are for both the Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech, COVID-19 vaccines as of 9:00 am ET on Monday, the agency said.

According to the count released on December 26, the agency administered 1,944,585 first doses of vaccine and distributed 9,547,925 doses.

Thus, another 182,558 doses were distributed over two days.

Most of these first doses were for healthcare professionals, although some states have started vaccinating elderly Americans living in nursing homes or other long-term care facilities.

The US coronavirus testing czar, Admiral Brett Giroir, said that any American who wants to be vaccinated can do so by June.

Vaccines were developed in record time, but cannot be distributed quickly enough, as hospitalizations for COVID-19 remained at around 100,000 in the United States for almost the entire month of December, and the death toll rises to 334,000.

The CDC has not yet released a state-by-state breakdown of the distribution of vaccines or injections, and only a handful of individual states have published their own records.

Operation Warp Speed ​​said it would be able to vaccinate 20 million Americans at highest risk by the end of 2020 until the last few weeks. The authorities never made it clear whether 20 million people would receive just the first or two doses by the end of the year.

Admiral Brett Giroir, czar of the US coronavirus tests, insisted that the figure of two million is an underestimated estimate, but admitted that the operation is not on track to vaccinate ten times more people than is documented than vaccinated in the next three days.

“The figure of two million is probably an underestimate, we have distributed 10.8 million doses to the states,” Admiral Giroir told Good Morning America on Monday.

“That two million number is three to seven days overdue. We certainly expect it to be a multiple of two million.

‘We will distribute 4.7 million more this week, so by the end of this week, in the hands of the states [will be] more than 15.5 million doses. ‘

Moderna and Pfizer vaccines should be administered in two doses. Moderna is given 28 days after the first, and Pfizer is given 21 days later.

Each vaccine was developed and mass-produced at record speed – but they were plagued by logistical flaws.

At the first launch of the Pfizer vaccine, Operation Warp Speed ​​officials claimed that Pfizer was struggling to meet its production targets, while Pfizer denied any production problems and instead blamed the government’s allocation process.

Caught in the crosshairs were dozens of states that said their allocations had been reduced. Operation Warp Speed ​​said the allocation numbers were estimates subject to change, not exact promises.

The CDC count is the first consolidated glimpse of how many vaccines have actually been applied, but it will inevitably lag behind the actual number of vaccines, as cities, counties and states put their own tracking systems online and report to the national agency.

Of the few state panels available, implementation is slow.

Idaho was one of the first states to publish its panel and reports 10,459 doses administered.

About 140,000 frontline workers and nursing home residents were vaccinated in New York, which received one of the largest initial allocations in the United States