The Trump administration’s Covid-19 vaccine delivery program needs a major injection in the arm because, at its current rate, it would take nearly 10 years to inoculate enough Americans to control the pandemic, a shocking new analysis from NBC News revealed on Tuesday. .
The purpose of Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership led by Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to the American public, is to ensure that 80 percent of the country’s 330.7 million inhabitants receive the vaccines at the end of June.
To achieve this goal, a little more than 3 million people would have to do the kicks a day, shows the math.
But so far, only about 2 million people – mostly frontline healthcare professionals and a few nursing home residents – have received their first injection of the 11.5 million doses that have been administered in the past two weeks, a review NBC News’s data from federal and state agencies showed.
“I don’t think we will be able to distribute the 20 million doses that were promised” this year, said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under President Donald Trump and a board member of Pfizer, on Tuesday fair at CNBC.
In other coronavirus developments:
- Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday, just over a week after President-elect Joe Biden received his first dose. “That was easy,” said a masked Harris and laughed. “I barely felt it.”
- The pandemic has thwarted the dreams of millions of Americans and left many more “stuck in time,” an NBC News report found.
- Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Rejected an offer by Democrats to raise Covid-19 relief checks from $ 600 to $ 2,000.
- The number of deaths from the coronavirus in Russia could be three times higher than reported, suggest statistics released recently.
- HIV-positive people were initially excluded from Pfizer and Moderna vaccine trials.
- Rapper Lil Pump was banned from JetBlue forever after refusing to put on a mask during a Sunday flight from Fort Lauderdale to Los Angeles.
- A tearful plea by Californian nurse Gayana Chuklansev for people to “stop being careless” during the pandemic went viral on TikTok.
“Georgia, for example, started vaccinating nursing homes yesterday, and the vaccine is on the market now – it was authorized almost three weeks ago,” said Gottlieb. “So, we are late to enter some of these facilities.”
But as soon as people start to have the first chance, he said, “you will begin to see an impact on the most vulnerable population, I think, soon.”
The data, said Gottlieb, who ran the FDA from 2017 to 2019, shows that the vaccine “is partially protective after the first dose”.
“We don’t know exactly what the magnitude of this protection is and how long it will last,” he said. “But there is evidence that there is partial protection after the first dose.”
Later, on Tuesday, Biden criticized the Trump administration for “failing” the pace at which Americans are being vaccinated.
“We are grateful to companies, doctors, scientists, researchers and clinical trial participants and Operation Warp Speed for developing vaccines quickly,” he said. “But, as I have long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should.”
Dr. Celine Gounder, a member of the Biden Covid-19 advisory board, and Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, warned that the United States will fall far short of the projections of Trump administration officials of that anyone who wants an injection can get one in the spring.
Pence, who had his first chance earlier this month, is currently on vacation in Colorado. But in a statement, Operation Warp Speed spokesman Michael Pratt insisted that “there is an expected delay between the shots going into the guns and the data being reported.”
Trump, who for months downplayed the danger of the pandemic that has infected more than 19.4 million people and claimed more than 336,000 lives in the U.S., promised in September that 100 million doses would be sent by the end of the year.
But in December, when the first doses were administered, Operation Warp Speed’s chief scientist, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, reduced that projection to 20 million.
“Well, we are certainly not in the numbers we would like at the end of December,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading epidemiologist, told CNN on Tuesday.
Dr. Brett Giroir, who is the US assistant secretary of health and czar of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 tests, told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News on Tuesday that the 2 million injections already administered are ” an underestimated estimate “.
But he agreed that they will not meet the goal of inoculating 20 million people before the New Year.
“Once again, we ended the Christmas vacation last week, even for hospitals that slow things down,” he said. “And it’s only been 15 days since the first vaccines were given.”
That said, more vaccines are reaching more people, said Giroir.
“We want to do this faster,” he said. “I would love to have everyone vaccinated now, we will have another 30 million doses in January, another 50 million doses in February, and this will have a very rapid impact, particularly on our vulnerable communities.”
