WASHINGTON (AP) – Barely a month into a massive vaccination campaign to stop the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration changed gears unexpectedly Tuesday to speed up gun delivery. A slow start had sparked widespread concern on the part of states and public health officials.
Now, Alex Azar, health and human services, has announced two major changes. First, the government will stop withholding the necessary second doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, virtually doubling the supply. Second, states should immediately begin vaccinating other groups to reduce the scale of priorities, including people 65 and older and younger people with certain health problems.
The move better aligns the outgoing administration with the new Biden-Harris team. On Friday, President-elect Joe Biden said he would quickly release most available doses of vaccine to protect more people. He said he supported the immediate release of vaccines that health authorities withheld as a precaution, to ensure they would be available to people who need their second dose.
“We had retained the second doses as a safety stock,” Azar told ABC. “Now we believe that our manufacture is predictable enough to ensure that there are doses of dose available for people of continuous production. So now everything is available to our states and our health care providers. ”
Simultaneously, it gave the green light to states to drastically expand the group of people eligible to receive vaccines.
“We call on our governors to vaccinate people aged 65 and over and under 65 with a state of health because we need to expand the group,” he said.
As of Monday morning, the government had distributed about 25.5 million doses to states, U.S. territories and major cities. But only about 9 million people had received their first shot. This means that only about 35% of the available vaccines had been administered.
Initially, the shots were aimed at health workers and residents in residences. Those aged 75 or over were next in line. But problems arose even in vaccinating that limited group of people. Some hospital and nursing home workers have been hesitant to get the vaccine. Scheduling problems caused delays in receiving shots at residences.
Some states, including Arizona, have or plan to open mass vaccination centers, with the aim of inoculating thousands of people a day in one place. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis opened vaccines to people 65 and older. In other states, local health authorities have begun asking residents age 65 and older to register, in anticipation of expanding the vaccination campaign.
“We need to reach more administration channels,” Azar said. “We have to take him to pharmacies, to community health centers.
“We will deploy teams to support states that make massive vaccination efforts if they want to do so,” he added.
Although Azar said the change was a natural evolution of the Trump administration’s efforts, on Friday he had recently raised questions about whether Biden’s call to speed up supplies was prudent. The Trump administration, which led an effort to develop and manufacture vaccines, hopes to avoid a repeat of previous debacle with coronavirus testing. Named “Operation Warp Speed”, the effort has produced two highly effective vaccines, with many more on the way.
Each state has its own plan on who should be vaccinated, based on the recommendations of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC recommendations give top priority to health care workers and residential residents.
But the slow pace of vaccine deployment has frustrated many Americans at a time when the number of coronavirus deaths has continued to rise. More than 376,000 people have died, according to the Johns Hopkins database.
U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said hundreds of thousands of people are being vaccinated every day across the country, but the pace of inoculations needs to improve.
“We’re in a race against this virus and frankly we’re behind,” Adams told Fox & Friends. “The good news is that 700,000 people are vaccinated every day. We’re going to hit a million people and we have to keep up that pace. “
In Philadelphia, health department spokesman James Garrow said Washington’s new leadership will take a long time to find out before it affects vaccine distribution in the city. “It’s a wholesale change after months of planning,” Garrow said.
Washington, DC, opened vaccines Monday to residents 65 and older and the system quickly overflowed. People reported problems with the website to register and wait hours to register by phone. A message on the city’s website Tuesday morning read: “The 6,700 appointments available for vaccination have been filled for the week of 1/11/21.”
Biden is expected to deliver a speech Thursday explaining his plan to speed up vaccinations to more people in the first part of his administration. His transition team has promised to release as many doses of vaccine as possible, instead of continuing the Trump administration’s policy of withholding millions of doses to ensure there will be enough supply to allow those who receive the first vaccine to get it. ne a second.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine requires a second shot about three weeks after the first vaccination. Another vaccine, produced by Moderna, requires a second vaccine about four weeks later. Single-shot vaccines are still being tested.
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AP writers Candice Choi in New York and Carole Feldman in Washington contributed.