It is difficult to find a dose of vaccine in the United States. Even the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not know how many vaccines there are in the United States.
In such a difficult situation, the Biden administration made a bold statement yesterday (January 26) that it would have enough vaccines for 300 million Americans by this summer.
In response to Biden’s promise, The Washington Post reported bluntly that it would not immediately accelerate vaccination efforts, but would significantly increase the chances of bringing the U.S. back to some sort of apparent normality by late summer or fall.
According to the Wall Street Journal, senior Biden administration officials said on the 26th that the federal government is trying to buy an additional 100 million doses of Pfizer vaccine and 100 million doses of Modner vaccine, increasing the total number of vaccine orders in the United States from 400 million doses by 50% to 600 million doses.
Officials said they expect the additional dose of vaccine to be open for vaccination in the summer. And these vaccines are enough for 300 million Americans to vaccinate two shots before the summer.
In his address that night, Biden also said he expects that all additional vaccines purchased will be distributed by the summer.” It’s a holistic plan and won’t be as we’ve seen in the past year…it’s a wartime job.”
Another senior administration official also said that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will begin to increase its vaccine supply to states next week, and increase from 8.6 million doses per week to at least 10 million doses per week over the next three weeks.
Biden administration officials also told governors that of the 10 million doses of the vaccine, 5.7 million will be Modna and 4.3 million will be Pfizer, according to people familiar with the matter.
But even if the doses of vaccine supply to states begin to be increased next week, the current supply will not meet demand, a senior administration official said.” It will take months before we can tell Americans that vaccinations are now open.”
CBS reported that Biden said on the same day when he talked about vaccine distribution that “this will be one of the most difficult operational challenges we face”, adding that the vaccine distribution process established by the Trump administration is worse than “the situation we expected”.
Biden also said, “We will increase the supply of vaccine to more than 15% in the short term and give our state and local partners more certainty to know when the vaccine will arrive.” The Biden administration plans to notify states of estimated vaccine funding three weeks in advance and update information on an operational basis to help states formulate response plans, the report said.
Governors earlier said that the fluctuation of allocations during the Trump administration complicated the task of staffing and managing appointments for vaccination sites.
Members of the Biden administration, including Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Jeffrey Zients, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said on the afternoon of the 26th.
The governors were introduced to these measures in the conference call.
Biden plans to establish 100 federally backed vaccination centers and send mobile teams to rural and underserved areas across the country, according to the report. The CDC will start to provide vaccines at local pharmacies next month.
However, on the 26th, Biden also gave the public a “vacctive injection”, admitting that “our plan takes time, and although the starting point is good, there may still be setbacks”.
The day before (25th), Biden also optimistically said that every American who wants to be vaccinated should be able to get vaccinated before spring. He also expects that the United States will soon reach the target of 1.5 million doses per day, which is 500,000 doses more than the goal he promised two months ago to achieve 1 million doses per day within 100 days in office.
Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the United States, believes that Biden’s goal of “100 million vaccines in the first 100 days of taking office” is reasonable. This figure is a lower limit rather than a ceiling.
At present, the promotion of vaccines in the United States is hindered by many factors, such as excessive waiting time for vaccination, website crash, and early evidence that low-income communities and communities of color lag behind richer white communities in vaccination.
So far, 44.4 million doses of these two vaccines have been distributed in the United States, of which 23.5 million have been inoculated, according to the data of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In addition to Pfizer and Modena, Johnson & Johnson said that it expects to report the results of large-scale clinical trials of the vaccine early next week, and if the results are valid and the vaccine is approved, they will deliver 100 million doses of the vaccine by the end of June.
According to the statistics of Johns Hopkins University in the United States, as of 6:23 Beijing time on January 27, 2021, the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States was 25,415,114, and the total number of deaths reached 424,398.
