Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer receives a dose of the Pfizer Covid vaccine at Ford Field during an event to promote and encourage Michigan residents to get the vaccine on April 6, 2021 in Detroit, Michigan.
Matthew Hatcher | Getty Images
A senior health official at the Biden administration said Monday that Michigan should “shut things down,” as it faces an overwhelming wave of coronavirus cases.
Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Rochelle Walensky said an increase in Covid-19 vaccines is not the answer, even when Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer asks the federal government to send more vaccines.
“I think if we try to get vaccinated about what’s going on in Michigan, we’d be disappointed that it took so long for the vaccine to work to take effect,” Walensky said during a White House pandemic briefing. . It took a few weeks to start vaccines and reduce the burden of cases, he noted.
Walensky said the state’s best bet “is to really close things off.”
Walensky called on Michigan “to go back to where we were last spring, last summer and close things up, to smooth the curve, to reduce contact with each other,” and to intensify testing and tracking contacts. . Cases in Michigan have risen sharply in recent weeks, averaging 7,359 new cases a day over the past week and approaching the pandemic highs set around Thanksgiving, according to data compiled by Johns University Hopkins. Deaths are also on the rise.
“Really what we need to do in these situations is close things up,” Walensky said.
Whitmer, a Democrat in a politically purple state where the shutdowns have been especially controversial, has been reluctant to order new restrictions in response to the latest increase in cases.
Last week he asked residents of his state to voluntarily limit their activities and urged schools to temporarily stop face-to-face learning. But he stressed that “to be very clear, these are not orders, mandates or requirements.”
No state records more daily infections per capita than Michigan, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.
Much of the current increase comes from a highly infectious variant of Covid, B.1.1.7, which is now the most common strain of the virus in the US.
Whitmer on Friday called on President Joe Biden’s administration to flood his vaccine status, going so far as to urge the government to “create a vaccination increase program to help states like Michigan.” According to reports, the administration is willing to direct some resources to the state, but not to vaccines.
Walensky, without addressing Whitmer directly, withdrew calls to send additional vaccines to states with severe outbreaks.
“There are different tools we can use during different periods” of an outbreak, Walensky said in Monday’s briefing.
“We know that if vaccines go into arms today, we will not see any effect of these vaccines, depending on the vaccine, over a period of two to six weeks,” he said. “So when you have an acute situation, an extraordinary number of cases like the one we have in Michigan, the answer is not necessarily administering vaccine. In fact, we know the vaccine will have a delayed response.”
“Similarly, we need this vaccine elsewhere,” Walensky said. “If we vaccinate today, we will have an impact in six weeks and we don’t know where the next place will grow.”
– Berkeley Lovelace Jr. of CNBC contributed to this report.