Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Wednesday urged states not to “micromanage” assigned doses of coronavirus vaccine, and said it is best to remove the shots as soon as possible, even if they have not. been able to vaccinate all its health workers. .
“There’s no reason states need to complete, they say vaccinate all health care providers, before opening vaccinations to old Americans or other particularly vulnerable populations,” Azar told reporters during a briefing.
“If they are using the entire vaccine assigned, ordered, distributed, shipped and carried in the arms of health care providers, every part, it’s fantastic,” he added. “But if for some reason their distribution is difficult and they have vaccines sitting in the freezers, of course you should open it to people 70 or older.”
U.S. officials are trying to pick up the pace of vaccinations after a slower-than-expected initial deployment. The coronavirus pandemic in the United States continues to accelerate, with the nation recording at least 219,200 new cases of Covid-19 and at least 2,670 virus-related deaths each day, based on a seven-day average calculated by CNBC using Johns Hopkins University.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has provided states with a scheme that recommends prioritizing health care workers and nursing homes, but states can distribute the vaccine as they see fit.
Azar said Wednesday that states that offer some “flexibility” around who takes the first doses “is the best way to get more shots in the arms” more quickly. “Faster administration could save lives right now, which means we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he said. “Hope is here in the form of vaccines.”
More than 4.8 million people in the U.S. have received the first dose of coronavirus vaccine as of Tuesday at 9 a.m., according to the CDC. The number is a far cry from the federal government’s goal of inoculating 20 million Americans by the end of 2020 and 50 million Americans by the end of this month.
U.S. officials acknowledged that vaccine distribution has been slower than expected. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Vaccination and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, told STAT News on Tuesday that she expects vaccine launches to accelerate “quite massively” in the coming weeks.
“These are the first stages of a really complicated task, but a task we are preparing,” he told STAT.
World health experts had said distributing the vaccines to some 331 million Americans in a matter of months could be much more complicated and chaotic than originally thought. In addition to making enough doses, states and territories also need enough needles, syringes, and bottles to complete vaccines.
The logistics for obtaining and administering the vaccine are complex and require special training. The Pfizer vaccine, for example, requires a storage temperature of minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines cannot be frozen and must be administered at room temperature and within a few hours or there is a risk of harm.
Read more: The long journey of the Covid vaccine: how the doses arrive from the manufacturing plant to the arm
Azar also said the holidays probably played a factor in the slow deployment of vaccines, and said health care providers knew it would be difficult to line up millions of people to get vaccinated by December.
During the same briefing, nearly 20 million doses of vaccine were delivered to more than 13,000 locations across the country, Army General Gustave Perna, who oversees logistics for President Donald Trump’s vaccine program , Operation Warp Speed.
Vaccine distribution is going “very well,” he said, adding that officials are still working to improve the process. “Our goal is to keep the drum beat constant so that states have an allocation planning cadence and then proper distribution to the right places as designated.”
“We’re always re-evaluating the numbers, making sure the distribution is in the right places [and] ensuring that execution is taking place so that other decisions on assignments can be made, ”he added.