The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned that the federal government has no idea how much COVID vaccine the nation has.
CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told Fox News Sunday, “I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have, and if I can’t tell it to you then I can’t tell it to the governors and I can’t tell it to the state health officials.”
“If they don’t know how much vaccine they’re getting not just this week but next week and the week after they can’t plan,” she added. “They can’t figure out how many sites to roll out, they can’t figure out how many vaccinators that they need, and they can’t figure out how many appointments to make for the public.”
Dr. Walensky said the lack of knowledge of coronavirus vaccine supply is indicative of “the challenges we’ve been left with.”
President Joe Biden aims to administer 100 million vaccine doses in his first 100 days, with experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, believing that it is absolutely doable.
The CDC director acknowledged that the nation must vaccinate people faster, but she said there is a shortage of supply. She said vaccine production will increase after the first 100 days and the introduction of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine will help ease shortage issues.
She said, “We are really hoping that we’ll have more vaccines and that will increase the pace at which we can do the vaccinations.”
Ron Klain, White House chief of staff, said the country has also been facing distribution issues because the Trump administration, which started the program, had no clear plan.
He told MSNBC, “The process of distributing the vaccine, particularly outside of nursing homes and hospitals, out into the community as a whole did not really exist when we came into the White House.”
“So, the process of getting that vaccine into arms, that’s the hard process, that’s where we are behind as a country and that’s where we are focused in the Biden administration on getting that ramped up,” Klain added.
Dr. Fauci, who is also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said although Biden’s aim to administer 100 million doses in 100 days is doable, it is not a final number.
He told CBS, “It is really a floor and not a ceiling. It is going to be a challenge. I think it was a reasonable goal that was set. We always want to do better than the goal that you’ve set.”
The need to vaccinate more and more people has taken on new urgency because the coronavirus is mutating, making the new strains more contagious. Last week, Dr. Fauci said the currently available COVID vaccines of Pfizer and Moderna may be less effective against new variants of the virus.
Biden’s US Surgeon General pick Dr. Vivek Murthy said on Sunday that the nation is in a race to adapt against the new strains.
“The virus is basically telling us that it’s going to continue to change and we’ve got to be ready for it,” Dr. Murthy said. “So the bottom line is, we’re in a race against these variants, the virus is going to change and it’s up to us to adapt and to make sure that we’re staying ahead.”
Dr. Walensky said people should get vaccinated when they have the opportunity and adhere to mitigation strategies in order to stop the virus from circulating. “I would say we’ve been in a race all along,” Dr. Walensky said. “The more virus that is out there, the more virus that is replicating, the more likely that we are going to have mutations and variants.”
