On New Year’s Eve, people wait in line to receive a vaccine against COVID-19 in a place for the elderly in an unoccupied store in the Oviedo shopping center. Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered Florida residents age 65 and older to be included in the first group to be offered coronavirus vaccines, contrary to CDC federal recommendations.
Paul Hennessy | LightRocket | Getty Images
The head of the Food and Drug Administration said Friday that he urges states to start vaccinating lower-priority groups against Covid-19 as U.S. officials try to pick up pace after a slower initial deployment of the expected.
FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, did not advise opening vaccines to all Americans, and told reporters that states should shoot at groups that “made sense,” such as the elderly, people with pre-existing conditions, police, firefighters and others. essential workers.
“We’ve heard in the press that some people have said,‘ Okay, I’m waiting to vaccinate all my health workers. We have about 35% of the vaccine. ”I think it’s reasonable to extend this“ to other groups, ”Hahn said Friday morning during an event hosted by the Alliance for Health Policy.“ I would strongly encourage that we would move forward by giving states the opportunity to be more expansive in who can administer the vaccine. “
Hahn stressed that the distribution of vaccines has yet to be driven by “data and science,” adding that states ultimately know what is best for their communities.
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. But in recent days, U.S. health officials have expressed concern that national guidelines could slow the pace of vaccinations, as states limit access to shots to certain people.
More than 21.4 million doses of vaccine had been distributed in the United States as of Thursday, but just over 5.9 million doses have been administered, according to data collected by 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.
Earlier this week, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar advised states against “micromanaging” allocated doses of vaccine, and said it is best to remove the shots as soon as possible.
“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 on Wednesday.
“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.”
World health experts had said distributing vaccines to some 331 million Americans in a matter of months could turn out to be much more complicated and chaotic than originally thought. 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.
At a news conference Thursday, state health officials said they were working to administer the vaccine as quickly as possible, but blamed the federal government’s lack of funding and lack of communication for the slowdown.
They said they expected the vaccination rate to increase once the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was authorized. The J&J vaccine requires only one vaccine, while the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses of about three to four weeks apart.
U.S. officials acknowledged that vaccine distribution has been slower than expected. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Vaccination and Respiratory Diseases, 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.