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Dr. Celine Gounder, a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid advisory committee, has criticized the Trump administration’s piecemeal response to Covid as some states in the US scramble to get the doses of vaccine they need.
“I think we’ve already had too many disparate responses across the states,” Gounder said in an interview Monday night on “The News with Shepard Smith”.
During a coronavirus briefing Friday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the federal government was sending his state 50,000 fewer doses of the vaccine than the week before. The state was receiving fewer doses as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded vaccine eligibility to anyone over 65 on January 12.
On Monday, Cuomo sent a letter to Pfizer asking if New York State could purchase vaccines directly from the company. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer last week made a similar request to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
Gounder told host Shepard Smith that this approach could cause more problems than it solves.
“I think Governor Cuomo himself said back in the spring that the situation around fans was essentially ‘a big Ebay’ with all the states bidding against each other for fans, and I think this kind of vaccine allocation approach is going to end up, frankly, in the same kind of situation that he himself criticized last spring, ”Gounder said.
CDC data shows that the United States averages about 900,000 vaccinations per day. In an interview with Fox News, Azar quoted the CDC issue and criticized the Biden administration’s goal of “100 million shots in the first 100 days.”
“We will have distributed 250 million doses of the vaccine by the end of April,” Azar said. “If they have only had 100 million vaccinations by then, it will be a tragic waste of the opportunity we have given them.”
Gounder, an epidemiologist at NYU, qualified Azar’s statement, noting that the distribution did not mean actual injections of the vaccine.
“We have seen, however, that the cast is very different from receiving gunshots, that that last mile of delivery is really the hardest part here,” Gounder explained. “Second, we haven’t confirmed yet that that number of doses, that 250 million number that he’s citing there, is really going to come to fruition.”
Cuomo, in a separate letter to Azar, criticized him for “confusing” the public about the vaccine stocks. Azar admitted on Friday that no stock currently exists.
Biden’s adviser Dr Michael Osterholm has warned that the worst of the Covid pandemic is yet to come, and the data confirms his grim prediction. The United States is rapidly approaching 400,000 deaths in the pandemic, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. This equates to about one in 822 Americans. For 19 consecutive days, there have been at least 23,000 people in ICUs due to Covid in the United States, according to the Covid Tracking Project. The HHS reported that nearly 80% of intensive care beds are occupied nationwide.
Gounder said the United States is currently in “our fifth summit” and the next few months will be spent “layering protections” to avoid another.
“We really need to double down on things like masking and social distancing, outside rather than inside, in well ventilated spaces,” Gounder warned. “If we’re doing these things, then, yeah, this might be our last peak, but it really depends on each of us doing whatever it takes to get back to normal life.”
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