Anthony Fauci told CNN on Tuesday that Operation Warp Speed will not reach its goal of getting 20 million Americans to receive the coronavirus vaccine by the end of December.
By numbers: Only 2.1 million people have received the first dose of the vaccine, with nearly 11.5 million doses distributed as of Monday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- With three days to go before the end of the year, the government would have to vaccinate millions of people a day to achieve the goal.
What it says: “We’re certainly not in the numbers we wanted to be at the end of December,” Fauci said.
- “I think as we enter January, we will see an increase in momentum that will hopefully allow us to pick up the projected pace of what we had talked about a month or two ago when we talked about the planned deployment of vaccines,” he said. continue.
- “We really want to vaccinate these priority people so that we can get to what we call ‘open season’ for the general population. When you get to the point where you can essentially say that anyone who wants to be vaccinated vaccinated, that’s when it really turns the outbreak dynamics “.
The big picture: In the first week of Pfizer’s vaccine distribution, governors reported receiving fewer allocations than expected, even when members of Operation Warp Speed said in early December that they were confident they could distribute enough vaccines to vaccinate 20 million people.
- Army General Gustave Perna, a member of Operation Warp Speed responsible for distributing the vaccine, apologized for the “poor communication” with the states over the number of doses they were supposed to receive.
- President-elect Joe Biden, who will criticize the Trump administration for failed targets in a speech Tuesday, said he plans to administer 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days.