Dr. Celine Gounder, a member of Covid’s advisory committee to President-elect Joe Biden, criticized Covid’s partial response from the Trump administration as some U.S. states scramble to get the doses of vaccine they need.
“I think we’ve already had too many patchwork responses in all states,” Gounder said in an interview Monday evening on “The News with Shepard Smith.”
In a briefing on the coronavirus on Friday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the federal government is sending 50,000 fewer doses of the vaccine to its state than the previous week. The state received fewer doses as on January 12 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended eligibility for the vaccine to anyone over 65 years of age.
On Monday, Cuomo sent a letter to Pfizer asking if New York State could buy vaccines directly from the company. Last week, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made a similar request to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar.
Gounder told host Shepard Smith that this approach could cause more problems than it solves.
“I think Governor Cuomo himself had said in the spring that the situation around fans was essentially‘ a big Ebay ’and all states were bidding among themselves for fans, and I think that kind of approach to the ‘Vaccine allocation is frankly, it will result in the same kind of situation that he himself criticized last spring, “Gounder said.
CDC data show that the U.S. makes an average of about 900,000 vaccines a day. During an interview with Fox News, Azar quoted the CDC number and criticized the Biden administration’s goal of “100 million gunshots in the first 100 days.”
“We will have distributed 250 million doses of vaccine by the end of April,” Azar said. “If they’ve only made 100 million vaccines by then, it will be a tragic waste of the opportunity we’ve given them.”
Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York University, described Azar’s statement and noted that the distribution did not mean actual injections of the vaccine.
“We’ve seen, though, that the distribution is very different from receiving shots in the arms, that this last mile of delivery is really the hardest part here,” Gounder explained. “Secondly, we have yet to confirm that this dose number, that 250 million number you cite here, is really going to go away.”
Cuomo, in a separate letter to Azar, rebuked him for “confusing” the public about vaccine reserves. Azar admitted on Friday that there is currently no stock.
Biden’s adviser, Dr. Michael Osterholm, warned that the worst of the Covid pandemic is yet to come and that the data backs up his lousy prediction. The United States is rapidly approaching 400,000 deaths from the pandemic, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. This equates to approximately one in 822 Americans. For 19 consecutive days, there have been at least 23,000 people in the ICU because of Covid in the U.S., according to the Covid Follow-up Project. HHS reported that nearly 80% of ICU beds are occupied nationwide.
Gounder said the United States is “at our fifth summit right now” and that in the coming months it will try to “protect layers” to prevent another one.
“We really need to double things like masking and social distancing, on the outside instead of well-ventilated spaces on the inside,” Gounder warned. “If we do these things, then yes, this may be our last peak, but it depends on each of us doing what needs to be done to get back to normal life.”