President-elect Joe Biden this week criticized the Trump administration for “falling behind” in efforts to vaccinate Americans against the coronavirus and promising more federal involvement under his supervision. Amid concerns about the pace of vaccine deployment, President Donald Trump said that the responsibility for administering vaccines falls more rapidly on states.
“The Federal Government distributed the vaccines to the states”, Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “Now it’s up to the states to manage.”
Critics say the Trump team has assigned a lot of responsibility for vaccines to the state’s poorly resourced health departments, still struggling with the pandemic, although it hasn’t pressed Congress for help before. Lawmakers eventually approved nearly $ 9 billion for vaccine distribution in their end-of-year aid package, but states say it will take weeks to do things like create mass vaccination sites and launch public education campaigns.
“They should have done this before. And they should have sent that money to the states, ”said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “And then they should have worked with the states to set up all of these sites, so that when the vaccines arrived, we had all the places where the vaccines would be delivered.”
The government made optimistic assessments of what will surely become the largest immunization effort in the history of the United States, starting with the October statement by HHS Secretary Alex Azar that the country at the end of the year could even have 100 million doses, or enough for 50 million people to be vaccinated with a two-dose regimen. That target was gradually reduced to 40 million doses, enough for 20 million people to be vaccinated – a benchmark that federal authorities repeatedly quoted over the last Few months.
As for the injections administered so far, “we are certainly not in the numbers we wanted at the end of December,” said Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease expert in CNN Tuesday. On Wednesday, federal health officials expressed confidence that the pace of vaccinations will increase as early as next week.
“We’re launching a vaccine campaign in the midst of a pandemic outbreak, after a year that has exhausted and overwhelmed health professionals and public health departments, and we’re launching a vaccine campaign during the winter holidays,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a press call.
Operation Warp Speed, the government’s vaccine accelerator, says it plans to allocate 20 million vaccines by the end of the year to the states, although the last 5 million will not actually be delivered until the first week of January. The government is maintaining an additional 20 million doses in reserve so that people can receive their second injection weeks later.
Moncef Slaoui, the head of the OWS, defended the 20 million target, saying the government has kept its word.
“The commitment we can make is to make vaccine doses available … and I think that commitment has been fulfilled,” said Slaoui last week, adding that vaccinations were taking place “more slowly than we thought”.
State officials say it takes time to scale up any vaccination efforts, let alone Covid’s massive undertaking. States and hospitals are hammering who takes the shots first. The vaccine made by Pfizer must be stored in ultra-cold temperatures. And local officials say they are figuring out how to safely conduct a mass vaccination effort while the virus is still circulating widely.