Vaccine distribution: the Trump administration is expected to change the course of implementation plans

Vaccine distribution: the Trump administration is expected to change the course of implementation plans

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The Trump administration plans to release the second reserved doses immediately, a senior government official told CNN – a plan already announced by President-elect Joe Biden that was first reported by CNN. The official predicts that the reserved doses will be distributed in the next two weeks.

The new plan would also change guidelines to allow vaccination immediately for anyone over 65 and would help states establish mass vaccination sites if they request assistance. The administration wants to shift the focus from hospitals and focus more on adding more accessible locations, such as pharmacies, the source said.

This will attempt to resolve a recurring problem that states faced when trying to administer the vaccine through hospitals and medical service providers who said they did not have the resources or personnel to serve as vaccination clinics.

The change in guidelines, which is expected to be announced at a midday briefing on Tuesday by Operation Warp Speed, is a significant change from the approach taken by the Trump administration, which previously refused to release all available doses. Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines require two rounds of injection and, although the release of almost all available vaccine doses can quickly increase availability, it also runs the risk of depleting the resources needed to ensure that people are fully vaccinated .

The changes come after two Operation Warp Speed ​​meetings held by HHS Secretary Alex Azar in the past 48 hours on how to speed up the delay process, according to the official. Vaccine manufacturing has not increased as rapidly as many experts expected.

Recently, last week, Operation Warp Speed ​​postponed Biden’s team’s plan to release all doses now.

“If President-elect Biden is asking for the distribution of vaccines knowing that a second dose would not be available, that decision is without science or data and is contrary to the FDA-approved label,” said OWS spokesman Michael Pratt on Friday. fair in the light of the Biden Ad. “If President-elect Biden is suggesting that the maximum number of doses should be made available, consistent with ensuring that a second dose of the vaccine will be there when the patient appears, then this is already happening.”

Last week, two senior FDA officials said that anyone who receives these vaccines needs both doses, dismissing the idea of ​​stretching the supply by allowing only one dose or cutting doses in half.

They also rejected other ideas to stretch the vaccine supply and said people who are speculating on whether to settle for just one dose or cut doses in half are misinterpreting the data.

Biden's Covid vaccine distribution plan still evolving days before inauguration

“We have been following discussions and news on how to reduce the number of doses, increase the time interval between doses, change the dose (half dose) or mix and match vaccines to immunize more people against COVID-19,” the FDA commissioner , Dr. Stephen Hahn, and Dr. Peter Marks, who heads the FDA’s vaccine division, said in a statement at the time.

Nearly 9 million people received their first doses of the vaccine and nearly 25.5 million doses of the vaccine have already been distributed, said the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that falls far short of the government’s initial estimates, which at some point predicted that 20 million Americans would be vaccinated by the end of 2020.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus is emerging in the United States. More than 200,000 new cases of Covid-19 were reported every day during the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University, and the United States recorded an average of more than 3,200 reported deaths each day during that period.

CNN’s Sara Murray contributed to this report.

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