By Peter Szekely and Dan Whitcomb
(Reuters) – The Trump administration acted on Tuesday to speed up the vaccination of Americans against COVID-19, releasing the rest of the doses it had been keeping in reserve and recommending states to vaccines immediately open to people 65 and older.
Federal and state health officials have been struggling in recent days to step up vaccination programs that administered vaccines to just 9.3 million Americans, as coronavirus infections remain at record levels in many U.S. states, almost two weeks later the beginning of the year.
Many US states have strict rules in place to give injections to health care workers and nursing home residents, telling “non-essential workers” that they can wait months for their turn.
“We already distribute more vaccine than health professionals and people in nursing homes,” United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar told ABC News. “We need to get more management channels.”
Approximately 27.5 million doses have been distributed by the United States government to the states so far, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Azar said the outgoing government, which kept the doses in reserve to ensure that everyone who received the first inoculation received its second injection on schedule and was now confident enough in the supply chain to release that stock.
Last week, a spokesman for Joe Biden said that the president-elect, who will take office on January 20, will release more of the reserved doses.
The rate of vaccination has increased to 700,000 per day across the country and is expected to reach 1 million per day in 10 days, officials said.
“Michigan and states across the country remain ready to receive more injections, which is why the Trump Administration’s decision to comply with our request and release millions of doses of the vaccine is so crucial,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement. communicated.
Whitmer, who supported the lower vaccination age, is seeking permission from the U.S. government to purchase 100,000 doses of vaccine directly from manufacturer Pfizer Inc.
The US Food and Drug Administration has authorized the vaccine from Pfizer and partner BioNTech SE and a second vaccine from Moderna Inc for emergency use.
As of Monday night, the United States had reported a total of 22.5 million coronavirus infections and 376,188 deaths during the pandemic, the highest number in any country. Nearly 130,000 Americans were hospitalized with COVID-19 at midnight on Monday.
GRIM SCENES AT CALIFORNIA HOSPITAL
A Reuters count showed that the number of COVID-19 patients in need of hospitalization may have stabilized, at least temporarily, although public health officials warn that further spread can still be seen on holidays.
California’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Mark Ghaly, has cited several promising trends in COVID metrics across the state in the past few days, including a slowdown in the number of confirmed daily cases and a leveling off in positive tests.
The number of new COVID hospitalizations across the state has dropped to about 2,500 hospitalizations per day for the past two days, from a daily average of about 3,500 hospitalizations in the previous days. Ghaly called this “the biggest sign for me that things are starting to flatten out and potentially get better”.
Despite the encouraging statistics, the team at Providence St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, California, said the situation was bleak.
“Where at first we were overwhelmed with a lot of patients – we still have a lot of patients – but now it looks like they are sicker than ever,” said Mary Mendy, executive director of intensive care services at the hospital about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles .
“And every day there are Code Blues on the floor and more and more patients are upgraded to the ICU. It’s devastating,” said Mendy.
The latest wave was potentially exacerbated by a more infectious variant of the virus first seen in the UK and now found in at least 10 U.S. states – California, Florida, New York, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Connecticut, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Texas.
(Reporting by Peter Szekely, Barbara Goldberg and Maria Caspani in New York, Anurag Maan in Bangaluru and Steve Gorman and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Bill Berkrot, Peter Cooney and Cynthia Osterman)