The United States ends its run with COVID-19 vaccine launches

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Every afternoon, Cyrus Shahpar, MD, the data guru of the White House COVID-19 response team, emails employees with the daily count of COVID-19 vaccinations administered in the United States.

The figures, collected from the states before the final figures published on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, act as a sort of report sheet on the team’s efforts.

Saturday, April 3 was a new record: 4.1 million vaccines made in a single day, more than the total population of some states.


While the United States has a long way to go before it is done with COVID-19, there is finally some good news in the nation’s long and erroneous slogan through the pandemic.

After a rocky start in December and January, vaccination is occurring faster than almost anyone thought possible. As more people see their friends and family roll up their sleeves, hesitation also decreases.

In environments where a large number of people are vaccinated, such as residences, COVID-19 cases and deaths have fallen.

These gains, however, have not been shared equally. According to CDC data, 69% of fully vaccinated people are white, while only 8% are black and about 9% are Hispanic, a group that now accounts for the majority of new cases of COVID-19.

Officials say this is partly because the vaccines were first given to the elderly. The average life expectancy of blacks in the United States is already 72 years, which means there were fewer people of color represented in the first groups who were eligible. Experts expect underrepresented groups to start catching up as more states open vaccines to younger people.

According to the overall number of daily doses of vaccine, the United States ranks third, behind China and India. According to the website Our World in Data, America ranks fourth, behind Israel, the United Kingdom and Chile, in the total percentage of the vaccinated population.

A positive development

It is an impressive change for a country that failed for months to develop effective evidence and is still struggling in some sectors to investigate new cases and quarantine its contacts.

The rotating average of seven days of vaccines administered in the United States is currently more than 3 million a day.

“We knew we had to reach 3 million a day at some point, if we wanted to vaccinate most people this year, but I don’t think most people would expect it to happen so soon,” said Eric Toner, MD, senior academic at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, Maryland.

Prior to taking office, President Joe Biden pledged to get 100 million gunshots during his first 100 days in office. After reaching that target in late March, it doubled it to 200 million vaccines on April 30. After saying for the first time that all adults should be eligible to line up for the vaccine on May 1, Tuesday increased that date to April 19.

Some media reports have seen this repeated movement of target sites calculated: an undeclared strategy of underpromise and overprinting with the aim of rebuilding public confidence.

But others point out that even if this is true, the goals that are set are not easy and achieving them has never been given.

“I think the Biden administration really has a lot of credit for pushing companies to get more vaccines faster than they had anticipated,” Toner said. “And the states have responded really well as well as the federal government when it comes to setting up vaccination sites. So not only do we get the vaccines, we put them in people’s arms faster than they are.” I expected”.

Others agree.

“We’re doing an amazing job and I think the United States is starting to bend the curve,” said Carlos del Rio, MD, an infectious disease specialist and distinguished professor of medicine at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

“I think, in general, it’s that everyone is dedicated to working to do it,” he said.

On Saturday, the day the United States reached its vaccination record, it volunteered to be vaccinated.

“I mean, of all the bad things we do to people as doctors, that’s something people are very happy about, right?” said del Rio.

He said he vaccinated a young woman who asked him if he could video chat with his mother, who was nervous about receiving the shot. She answered her mother’s questions and later that day, she went down to get vaccinated herself.

‘We see it as a war‘

The White House COVID-19 response team has worked hard to better coordinate the work of so many people at both the federal and state levels, said Andy Slavitt, the team’s senior adviser, in an interview with Medscape Medical News.

“We see it as a war, and in a war, you do it all: you bring in experienced staff; you bring in all the resources; you create multiple routes,” Slavitt said. “Leave nothing to chance”.

Among the levers that the administration has pulled, the use of the Defense Production Act has helped vaccine manufacturers get the necessary supplies, Slavitt said.

The administration has created a number of FEMA-run community vaccination centers and mobile vaccination sites to complement state-led efforts and has activated a federal health law called the Public Preparedness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP). , which provides immunity against retired doctors and nurses, among others, who sign up to help get vaccinated. This has helped get more people into the field by shooting.

The administration also canceled a plan to allocate vaccines to states based on their pace of administration, which would have punished insufficient states. Instead, doses are allocated based on population.

In a call to the media on April 7, when asked if the administration would send additional vaccines to Michigan, a state that saw an increase in COVID-19 cases with more transmissible variants, Slavitt said no. they managed the supply of vaccines “according to some formula.”

He said they were distributing based on population “because that’s key,” but they also located vaccines “surgically in places that have had the biggest disease and where people have the most exposure.”

He said places like community health centers and retail pharmacies have the power to order vaccines directly from the federal government, which helps get more supply to the hardest hit areas.

Slavitt said making 4.1 million vaccines a day last Saturday was rewarding.

“I’ve seen pictures … of people breaking tears when they were vaccinated, of people applauding active military people for taking care of them,” he said, “and I think of people who have been looking for a long time without hopes, or that they have been very afraid. “

“It’s incredibly encouraging to think of a few million people taking a step back into normal life,” he said.

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