WASHINGTON (AP) – It sounded so ambitious at first blush: 100 million shots in 100 days.
Now, a month into his presidency, Joe Biden is on a smooth path to achieving that goal and goes far beyond the much more ambitious and daunting mission of vaccinating all eligible adults against coronavirus. at the end of the summer.
Limited offer of the two approved COVID-19 vaccines has hampered the pace of vaccinations, and this was before the extreme winter weather delayed delivery of about 6 million doses last week. But the United States is on the verge of a breakthrough in supply as manufacturing increases and waiting for a third vaccine will be available in the coming weeks.
This means that the act of supplying injections will soon be the dominant constraint, and is motivating the Biden administration to drive the dramatic expansion of the universe of those who will make injections and where Americans will meet with them. to shoot them.
“It’s one thing to have the vaccine and it’s very different to have it in someone’s arms,” Biden said Friday as he toured Pfizer’s manufacturing plant. in Portage, Michigan. The company plans to double the pace of vaccine delivery in the coming weeks.
Since its approval in December, more than 75 million doses of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been distributed in two regimens, of which 63 million have been injected, reaching 13% of Americans. Nearly 45 million of these doses have been administered since the opening of Biden on January 20th.
The pace of delivery of these vaccines is about to take off. About 145 million doses are expected to be delivered over the next 5 1/2 weeks, with an additional 200 million planned for the end of May and 200 million for the end of July.
This is ahead of the planned Food and Drug Administration approval for the emergency use of a third vaccine, by Johnson & Johnson. The single-dose J&J vaccine is expected to help accelerate the path to immunity and requires half the vaccination resources of two-shot regimens. But there is no massive stockpile of J&J doses ready to deploy on the first day.
“We’ll start with just a few million inventory,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said last week. However, when combined with projected increases in other vaccines, J&J doses could demonstrate the fundamental breakthrough in delivering sufficient shots for almost all American adults by the end of June, at least a month earlier. of what is currently planned.
The average daily inoculation amounted to 1.7 million shots a day last week, but it is soon expected to be up to twice the dose each day. The focus of the Biden team is now changing rapidly to ensure that these doses can be accustomed, although the administration has resisted calls from some health experts to publicly set a “moon” goal. ”In terms of how many daily doses he expects to administer.
Biden first set its target of 100 million doses in 100 days on December 8, days before the first vaccines received emergency use authorization. On the day of the inauguration, it was clear that the United States was in the process of achieving this goal.
Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and professor of public health at George Washington University, said she would like the administration to commit to achieving a more ambitious goal of 3 million shots a day.
“I want to see them put that stake on the ground and ask everyone to help them achieve that goal,” he said.
The current rate of vaccination slowed markedly in recent days as the winter weather covered administration sites in Texas and throughout the South, and icy conditions stalled supplies at maritime centers in Louisville, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee. .
One-third of the delayed doses have already been administered, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, announced Sunday. The White House predicts that the remaining delayed doses will be injected before March 1 and that the daily rate of vaccinations will continue to increase.
Much of the increase, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comes from people receiving their second dose of the Modern or Pfizer vaccine. Meanwhile, the pace of first-dose vaccines has been steady in recent weeks, hovering around an average of 900,000 shots a day.
Increasing both the rate of first-dose administration and that of global vaccinations will be key to achieving herd immunity, which is estimated to require vaccination of approximately 80% of the population, with the hope of ending the pandemic and reduce the occurrence of possible even more dangerous. “Mutant” strains of the coronavirus.
This means keeping demand high. The administration has expressed concern about public opinion polls proving that tens of millions of Americans are reluctant to get the vaccine and increasing public outreach to overcome this hesitation, as the death toll in the United States is approaching 500,000 – “a terribly historic milestone in ‘this country’, as Fauci said and ‘we haven’t gotten out of it yet’.
Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, director of data for COVID-19 at the White House, said in an interview that the administration “is focused on going out into communities and making sure people know that these vaccines are safe and how they can get it, with the goal of vaccinating almost every American. “
The administration has also focused its focus on identifying new vaccine delivery pathways beyond those already used by states, including federally administered mass vaccination sites, smaller community health centers, and retail pharmacies. The White House’s goal is to defend the sites now so that they are ready to deal with the influx of vaccines in the coming weeks.
“They can drive a lot more volume through these channels, through these big stores, through community health centers,” Scott Gottlieb, an FDA commissioner in the Trump administration, told MSNBC on Friday. He praised the Biden administration for having created these sites in advance.
The Pentagon, at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has begun deploying thousands of troops in active service to open mass vaccination centers across the country, with plans in place for up to 100 sites capable of supplying 450,000 doses a day. The first of these facilities opened last week in California, with locations in Texas and New York opening in the coming days.
“We’ve always known along the way that we should provide federally supported sites,” FEMA Acting Administrator Robert Fenton said last week, describing the initial locations as a “pilot” for larger deployment. “These will continue to grow as supply is incorporated.”
The administration also deployed the federal pharmacy program that had initially been announced by Trump’s White House. He has administered doses directly to chains such as CVS and Walgreens, leveraging existing distribution chains for injections such as the flu vaccine.
Governors, along with the CDC, identified specific commercial chains to begin administering vaccines to their states, with the goal of reaching underserved communities and also testing the ability of pharmacies to increase injections.
During its first four days of operation, with approximately 15% of pharmacies nationwide, the pharmacy program administered more than 700,000 of the 1 million initial weekly doses allocated by the federal government. This led the White House to quickly double it to 2 million doses this coming week.
New increases are likely to occur, as the White House controls the ability of pharmacies to administer injections. The National Association of Chain Drug Stores estimates that its members alone can administer more than 3 million doses a day.
Additional federal channels to administer inoculations have caused some fuss from governors who want even more vaccines to be passed through their state allocations. That figure has gone from less than 9 million doses per week to 13.5 million in the first few weeks of Biden in charge.
“Everyone wants more vaccines,” said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., “I know the continued increase is great news for all of us.”
“The more ways you bring opportunities online the better,” he added.