Top U.S. health officials encouraged states to start vaccinating people with wider recognition that vaccine launches have been slower than expected and opened the vein for a wide range of Americans to start receiving shots.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar during a call to reporters on Wednesday blamed the introduction of Covid-19 shots during the holidays and overly detailed state plans to hamper the vaccination campaign. He urged governors to vaccinate more seniors and other high-risk populations to prevent the shots from sitting in the freezers.
Photographer: Micah Green / Bloomberg
If governors “use all the vaccine assigned, ordered, shipped, distributed, put it in the hands of health care providers, it’s fantastic,” Azar said. “But if for some reason their distribution is difficult and they have vaccines sitting in the freezers, of course you should open Until 70 years and over, 65 years and over. You should make sure that the patients in the nursing home are vaccinated. “
Approximately 5.2 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. have been administered in the U.S. since mid-December, according to data collected by Bloomberg News. This represents about 31% of the doses distributed so far, according to the Bloomberg tracker.
Acceleration plans
Azar and other Warp Speed operation officials said they expected vaccinations to begin to accelerate, although they declined to provide the number of shots administered daily and the number they expect to be given at the end. of the month. National Health Institutes Director Francis Collins said last Wednesday in an interview with the Washington Post that he expects the U.S. to fire about a million shots a day, a number that Operation Warp Speed officials say comment denied.
HHS announced that it will donate $ 3 billion to states, territories and some cities to support vaccinations against Covid-19. The department will also provide $ 19.1 billion to jurisdictions for testing, tracking contacts and other pandemic mitigation measures.
Azar said the administration has been examining the factors that have slowed deployment in recent weeks. Operation Warp Speed will take advantage of its partnership with more than a dozen pharmacy chains earlier than planned to increase vaccinations. Azar said states can start sending doses to participating sites.
(Updates with additional details in the last two paragraphs.)