The director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaks during a White House press conference, chaired by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in the James Brady Press Room of the White House on January 21, 2021 in Washington, DC.
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The winter storm and power outages in Texas pose a “significant” problem for the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, White House Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“Well, obviously it’s a problem. It’s slowed down in some places to a halt,” Fauci said in an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “We’ll just have to make up for it as soon as the weather gets up a bit, the ice melts and we can get the trucks and people out.”
“It’s significant when you have this strip of the country … that it’s really immobilized in a lot of ways,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The Biden administration is working to pick up the pace of vaccinations in the United States following a slower-than-expected deployment under former President Donald Trump. However, the winter storm that hit Texas is causing some shipments of Covid-19 vaccines to be delayed and forcing vaccination sites to be temporarily closed.
Nearly half a million jeans remain without power on Thursday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, after the state’s power grid failed to maintain heat demand for record low temperatures, causing more than 4 million shutdowns. According to The Weather Channel, millions of people are still under boiling water warnings.
The weather has disrupted service at the FedEx center in Memphis and caused package delays across the United States, the company said earlier this week. UPS’s Worldport package center in Louisville, Kentucky, and another regional center in Dallas have reopened after closing temporarily Monday night due to the weather.
It is unclear how this will affect the three new community vaccination centers, in Dallas, Arlington and Houston, that the Biden administration plans to help build. Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden’s Tsar Covid, told reporters last week that the centers would be operational the week of Feb. 22 and allow suppliers to administer more than 10,000 shots a day.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Once Texas opens more roads and residents have uninterrupted power, health care providers will have to do the “double time” on Covid-19 vaccines, Fauci said Thursday.
Approximately 3 million of the nearly 29 million Texans have received at least the first dose of two-dose Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer or Moderna, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 1.2 million of those people have already gotten their second shot.
Fauci added that he does not know how many doses of vaccine could have been destroyed due to power outages or delays in delivery.
– CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report.