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“Come on, give me a break, man,” President Biden told a reporter on Thursday, when asked if his goal of getting 100 million Americans immunized in his first 100 days is too modest. “It’s a good start, 100 million.” Biden was right that when he “first made this commitment, it was a lofty goal,” Politicowrites Renuka Rayasam. “But now it’s only a modest increase from the rate of vaccinations he inherited,” and experts agree that will no longer solve the problem.
“At a rate of 1 million doses per day, the virus will not be contained until 2022”, Politico reports. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at Baylor College of Medicine, said the United States needs to vaccinate 2-3 million people a day to quell the pandemic by September, and the sooner the better, given the appearance of new, more contagious variants. “We missed all the other opportunities,” Hotez said. “That’s all we have left.”
“I love that he set a goal, but a million doses a day?” Dr Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said The New York Times. “I think we can do better”, and in fact “we will have to do it if we really want to get this virus under control by, say, the summer”.
Currently, vaccination efforts in the United States are constrained by supply shortages and inefficient distribution of the two approved vaccines, from Modern and Pfizer / BioNTech. “States should run out of doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine within a few days,” Politico said. But the two companies are ramping up production, and Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine is expected to hit shelves by the end of February, so there should be enough supply to significantly exceed the current target. from Biden by April.
In the meantime, Biden’s administration is expected to focus “on fixing the mishmash of state and local immunization centers that has proven unable to handle even the current flow of vaccines,” the Times reports, citing experts. Biden has asked for $ 20 billion to significantly expand vaccination centers and he wants to hire 100,000 healthcare workers to administer the vaccines. If he can do it, former FDA director Dr Mark McClellan tells the Times, it should “push the number beyond a million doses per day and probably well beyond”.
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