The newly appointed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Sunday that the federal government remains in the dark about the amount of vaccine currently available and warned that states like New York will not be able to quickly replenish its limited stock.
“One of the biggest problems now is that I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have, and if I can’t tell you, then I can’t tell the governors and I can’t tell the state health officials,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky to “Fox News Sunday “.
Walensky added that the government “doesn’t have as many doses as we would like now for states like New York [or] to other states that claim to have run out of vaccine. “
While President Joe Biden promises to distribute 100 million Covid-19 vaccines in his first 100 days, Walensky said “supply will likely be the most limiting constraint in the beginning.”
“We really hope that after the first 100 days we will have much more production,” he added.
The Biden administration last week released its comprehensive plan to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, including an increase in the number of vaccination sites and an increase in vaccine production. The virus has claimed more than 418,000 American lives and infected more than 25 million in the United States, according to a NBC News tracker.
According to Bloomberg’s vaccine delivery tracker, the U.S. has recently reached a rate of 1 million vaccinations a day. The CDC reports that more than 20.5 million doses have been administered across the country by Saturday – about half of what states have in hand. The vast majority of vaccinees received only the first of the two necessary doses.
An NBC News poll found that only 11% of registered voters say the vaccination process is going “very well”, with 31% saying it is “very well”. Of those who say that the implementation did not go well, 64% attribute the blame mainly to the federal government.
In an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” program that aired on Sunday, Dr. Deborah Birx – who coordinated Trump’s response to Covid-19 of the White House – said the former president had “no staff , full-time staff at the White House working on the coronavirus. “
Xavier Becerra, Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, was asked in an interview on Sunday with CNN’s “State of the Union” whether Biden’s team was trying to reduce expectations about the distribution of vaccines so that success be seen as an important achievement factor.
“Well, if the plane is diving like this, you certainly won’t see that it will stay that way overnight,” he said. “What you’re trying to do is make the plane look like this to straighten up, and then go like this. In three – in 100 days, getting 100 injections with vaccines, 100 million injections with vaccines, is incredibly important. It is ambitious, bold and doable. We have to do this. But we have to recognize that we are doing this while the plane is on a dive like this. “
And in an interview for NBC’s “Meet the Press”, White House chief of staff Ron Klain said the goal of 100 million vaccines in the first 100 days of the Biden government was “bold” and “ambitious”, but “we need to continue after this. “
“This is our first goal, it is not our end goal, it is not the end point, it is just a metric that the American people can observe and measure how we are doing,” he said.
