WASHINGTON – The Biden government said on Thursday that it had secured 200 million more doses of coronavirus vaccines, enough to inoculate all American adults, but President Biden warned that logistical obstacles would likely mean that many Americans still would not have been vaccinated by the end of summer.
The additional doses amount to a 50 percent increase in the vaccine and will give the administration enough by the end of the summer to cover 300 million people. But it will still be difficult to place these photos in people’s arms. Both vaccines are two-dose regimens, with intervals of three and four weeks. Mr. Biden deplored the “gigantic” logistical challenge he faces during a presentation at the National Institutes of Health. He also expressed frank frustration with the previous administration.
“It’s one thing to have the vaccine,” said Biden. “Another thing is to have vaccinators.”
The Department of Health and Human Services said Pfizer and Moderna would each supply 300 million doses by the end of July in “regular increments”.
Management is pursuing a step-by-step process. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease expert, predicted on Thursday morning that as early as April, any American could start looking for a vaccine in a “hunting season” that would extend availability beyond priority categories.
“When we get to April, this is what I would call, for better writing, a ‘hunting season’,” said Fauci in an interview with NBC’s “Today” channel. “That is, virtually anyone and anyone in any category can start getting vaccinated.”
But the problem may be getting doses for people who don’t look for them promptly.
Biden carefully prevented his White House from being consumed by criticism of his predecessor, but on Thursday he aimed directly at Donald J. Trump for what he said was a failure to create a mass vaccination process. The president, who said he promised to speak openly to Americans about the challenges of the pandemic, blamed Trump for creating a significant pandemic by failing to oversee the creation of a simplified vaccine distribution program. “The vaccine program was in a much, much worse state than my team and I predicted,” said Biden.
“While scientists were doing their job to discover vaccines in record time, my predecessor – I will be very frank about it – did not do its job in preparing for the huge challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,” added Biden.
“It was a big mess,” he said. “It will take time to fix, to be frank with you.”
Health officials in the Trump administration rejected these suggestions, pointing to hundreds of instructions that Department of Health and Human Services officials offered to the incoming health team, including on allocation and distribution of vaccines.
Highly decentralized plans to distribute and administer vaccines, giving authority to local and state health departments as soon as doses are delivered, were developed with career officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense.
Officials involved in the distribution plans of the last government said at the end of last year that outside the first few weeks, when they carefully managed the flow of second dose reserves, their plan was to always send doses as soon as they were available, and that they never intended to stock up on doses.
The deal for 200 million additional doses of the coronavirus vaccine helps fulfill Biden’s promise in January to increase supplies to cover more of the population. He said then that the government was closing the deal with the two manufacturers as part of its larger promise that about 300 million Americans could receive a dose of the vaccine by the end of summer or early fall.
On Thursday, Biden said his government “has now bought enough vaccine to vaccinate all Americans”.
Dr. Nicole Lurie, who was assistant health secretary for President Barack Obama’s preparedness and response, said the vaccine’s hesitation may influence how quickly some Americans eager to be vaccinated can get the vaccine, but that more supply would mean more work to vaccinate people.
“We will be reaching more and more population, and the more population you will have to make an extra effort to reach,” she said. “It is to be expected that, as the offer continues to open, the public still has a lot of demand for vaccines. This is really the unknown. “
The government had already secured 400 million doses of vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, the two companies approved for emergency distribution – doses that were expected by the end of June. Biden said on Thursday that the companies would now deliver them in late May.
A third manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, asked the Food and Drug Administration to authorize its single-dose vaccine for emergency use, a decision that could be made by the end of the month and allow the vaccine to be distributed in the first week of March. . But the company is still trying to show that it can produce the vaccine at its plant in Baltimore on a large scale.
Federal authorities have so far refused to say how much of that vaccine will be ready for distribution if it passes regulatory hurdles, but they are warning not to expect a flurry of new doses from Johnson & Johnson soon.
“We have not found that the level of manufacture allows us to have as much vaccine as we think we need, out of the gate,” Andy Slavitt, a senior White House pandemic advisor, said recently.
So far, only about 10 percent of Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccine. On Thursday, the CDC said that about 34.7 million people received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, including about 11.2 million people who were fully vaccinated.
The pace of vaccinations has been accelerating steadily in recent weeks. The number of daily shots now averages about 1.5 million, compared with 1.1 million two weeks ago. At this rate, Biden will easily fulfill his promise to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office.
State and federal health officials say the main obstacle to vaccinating more people at this time is a lack of supplies. Management has been looking for a possible way to speed up production, including a possible breakthrough in which Moderna would fill its bottles with more doses, potentially getting millions more doses ahead of schedule.
But Biden is facing a number of long-standing manufacturing restrictions, including limited open space around the world to make more vaccines and the delicate and complex nature of vaccine production.
White House officials have pointed out what they say is their job, increasing the weekly supply of vaccines by 28 percent. But these doses resulted from an expected increase in manufacturing.
Unlike the last government, the White House pandemic team has been informing governors of projected supplies in three-week increments, so that state health departments know better how to plan ahead.
And they took a much more aggressive approach when using federal resources to obtain shots. The White House announced this week that it was building five new inoculation centers, including three in Texas and two in New York, which specifically target vaccinating people of color. The administration also said it plans to start sending one million doses of vaccine a week to federally supported community health centers in underserved neighborhoods. A new federal pharmacy vaccination program started this week.
And on Friday, the government announced that it was sending more than 1,000 active duty troops to Covid-19 vaccination centers across the country administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
FEMA, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said it expects to establish about 100 vaccination sites across the country as early as this month and that it would spend $ 1 billion on vaccination measures, including community vaccination sites.
Sharon LaFraniere and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reports.