The boxes containing the Modern COVID-19 vaccine are ready to be shipped to the McKesson distribution center in Olive Branch, Mississippi, USA, December 20, 2020.
Paul Sancya | Reuters
The Biden government’s plan to release nearly all available doses of Pfizer and Moderna’s coronavirus vaccines to states is unlikely to cause supply problems in the future, said a member of Covid-19 advisory board to President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday. market.
The advisory team has had numerous conversations with vaccine manufacturers Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, among others, on supply issues, said Dr. Celine Gounder, who participates in the panel and specializes in infectious diseases at the Grossman School of Medicine at NYU.
Except for some unforeseen “manufacturing confusions”, the Biden government is “confident” that there will be no problem getting people to take their second dose in time, she said.
“We are not too concerned about that,” Gounder told the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health during a webcast on Thursday afternoon. “If you look at the production schedule, they are going to release more and more doses over time, so it really opens things up significantly.”
Gounder’s comment comes hours before Biden revealed his plan to vaccinate the US population and end the pandemic that killed at least 385,503 Americans in nearly a year. Biden criticized the Trump administration’s vaccine distribution strategy, saying that at the current rate “it will take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people”.
The rate of vaccination in the United States is much slower than the authorities expected. On Wednesday, at 9:00 am ET, more than 29.3 million doses of the vaccine were distributed in the United States, but just over 10.2 million vaccines were administered, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Diseases. The number is a far cry from the federal government’s goal of inoculating 20 million Americans by the end of 2020 and 50 million Americans by the end of this month.
Some state governors, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, have complained about the availability of the vaccine, saying the lack of doses has inhibited their ability to vaccinate people.
The Trump administration on Tuesday adopted Biden’s plan to release most of the doses he had withheld for the second round of two-dose vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
General Gustave Perna, who oversees the logistics of President Donald Trump’s vaccine program, Operation Warp Speed, had previously said that separating Covid’s spare doses was “good planning by an army general officer”, ensuring that the right people can get vaccines when needed.
In an attempt to speed up the pace of vaccinations, the Trump administration has also changed the way it allocates vaccine doses to states and the CDC has expanded vaccine eligibility for everyone aged 65 and over, as well as for those with comorbid conditions , such as diabetes and heart disease.
Some public health experts question whether companies can make more doses before people need their second injection.
Gounder said on Thursday that the government still plans to maintain “a small reserve” of doses.
“We will launch almost all [doses] with a small surplus of reserve because we want to speed up the rate of vaccination, “she said.” This is really a decision on how to manage the supply. It is not a recommendation on the vaccination dose or schedule. “