The United States has increased COVID-19 vaccinations in the past few days, after a slower-than-expected start, bringing the number of vaccines administered to about 4 million, government health officials said on Sunday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, also said on ABC’s “This Week” program that President-elect Joe Biden’s promise to administer 100 million injections of the vaccine in his first 100 days in office is achievable .
And he rejected President Donald Trump’s false claim on Twitter that the deaths and cases of coronaviruses in the United States were greatly exaggerated.
“All you need to do … is to enter the trenches, enter the hospitals, enter the intensive care units and see what is going on. These are real numbers, real people and real deaths, “said Fauci on NBC’s” Meet the Press “program.
The death toll in the U.S. has surpassed 350,000, the highest number in any country, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, while more than 20 million people across the country have been infected. States have reported a record number of cases in the past few days, and funeral homes in Southern California are being flooded with bodies.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the pandemic is getting worse in his city as the virus spreads rapidly within families and people let their guard down with news of a vaccine coming. “This is a virus that attacks our weakness, attacks our exhaustion,” he told CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.
Experts believe that the actual number of deaths and infections in the United States is much higher and that many cases have been overlooked, in part because of insufficient testing.
Fauci said he saw “a small glimpse of hope” after 1.5 million doses administered in the previous 72 hours, or an average of around 500,000 a day, a sharp increase in vaccinations. He said this brings the total to around 4 million.
He acknowledged that the United States fell short of its goal of having 20 million doses shipped and distributed by the end of December.
“There were some failures. This is understandable, ”said Fauci. “We are not where we want to be, there is no doubt about that.”
But he expressed optimism that the momentum will increase in mid-January and that, in the end, the United States will vaccinate 1 million people a day. Biden’s “goal of vaccinating 100 million people in the first 100 days is a realistic goal,” said Fauci.
Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the government’s vaccine development and distribution effort, told CBS that 17.5 million doses had been sent. About 13 million of them have been distributed to clinics, hospitals and other places where they will be administered, according to Fauci.
The 20 million dose target was not achieved in part because local health departments and medical facilities had to focus on testing to deal with a sudden increase in cases, said US surgeon general Jerome Adams. And the holiday season meant health workers were off, he said.
“I don’t want anyone to think that I’m being Polish here. That’s what we delivered and we hope this translates into vaccines. This did not go the way we would like, ”Adams told CNN’s“ State of the Union ”.
On Sunday morning, Trump falsely tweeted that the outbreak was “very exaggerated” because of the “ridiculous” methodology of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He also complained that Fauci was credited by the news media for doing “an incredible job” when Fauci “works for me and the Trump administration, and I don’t get any credit for my work”.
Fauci and others are warning that an additional increase is likely because of the holidays and the cold climate that keeps people indoors.
“It can and probably will get worse in the coming weeks, or at least maintain the terribly high level of infections and deaths that we are seeing,” said Fauci.
Arizona on Sunday reported a one-day record of more than 17,200 new cases, surpassing the previous 12,000 mark set in early December. Health officials said the jump appears to reflect infections from Christmas holidays, but was probably also inflated by a reporting delay over the New Year’s weekend.
North Carolina and Texas reported record numbers of people in the hospital with COVID-19 – almost 3,600 and more than 12,500, respectively.
Abroad, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that more costly restrictions on blocking in England are likely, as a variant of the coronavirus has taken infection rates to the highest levels ever recorded. More than 50,000 new infections have been reported daily in the past six days.
Scientists said the variant was up to 70% more contagious. Although Fauci says the United States needs to do its own study, he noted that British researchers believe that the mutant version is no longer deadly or more likely to make people sicker and that vaccines are effective against it.
But Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who serves on the board of vaccine maker Pfizer, said in “Face the Nation” that the variant “really creates more urgency in trying to get that vaccine out more quickly and getting more people vaccinated. “
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Associated Press writers around the world contributed to this report.