WASHINGTON – The severe winter storms that devastated Texas and neighboring states have delayed the distribution of 6 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, but Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that it is just a “temporary setback” that will be fixed in mid week.
“Obviously, it is a setback, because you would like to see the steady flow of vaccines coming into people’s arms. But we can catch up,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press”.
“The number was 6 million doses late. We got 2 million and we project that by mid-week we will have made up for it.”
The brutal climate left millions of people without power as temperatures plummeted. And even when power is coming back on, broken pipes mean that many still don’t have drinking water. President Joe Biden declared a major disaster in 77 counties across Texas, making them eligible for federal recovery funds, and some emergency management officials want to include the entire state in the disaster declaration.
The bad weather led to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called “widespread delays in shipments and deliveries of the Covid-19 vaccine”. Power outages have also forced some health workers to quickly administer doses of the vaccine before they go bad.
More than 57 million doses of the vaccines have been administered – with 41 million first doses administered and 16 million people fully vaccinated with the two-dose regimen – according to an analysis by NBC News.
The average daily number of Covid-19 cases continues to plummet from a peak after the holiday. The US reported more than 100,000 new cases daily in just one of the past 14 days, a month after regularly reaching more than 200,000 new cases, according to data from NBC News. Daily deaths are also decreasing, but more slowly, still regularly eclipsing 2,000.