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The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that the Covid-19 vaccine would not be widely available by the end of February, as the Trump administration had previously announced.
The new administration is determined to reach the goal of 100 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine in 100 days, Dr Rochelle Walensky Told Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “TODAY”.
However, the vaccines will not be available to just anyone in pharmacies, like the flu shot, at the end of February, as the former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services said. Alex Azar in Guthrie last month.
“We will, as part of our plan, put the vaccine in pharmacies. Will it be in all pharmacies in this country within that time? I don’t think so,” Walensky said. “I don’t think that by the end of February we will have vaccines in every pharmacy in this country.”
“After 100 days, there are still a lot of Americans who need vaccines, so we have our pedal to the metal to make sure we can get that many vaccines there,” she says. “We recognize that this is the most immediate emergency to get this country back to health.”
According to Walensky, work to reach the 100-day goal “has already started” and the main points of the plan are to ensure that vaccine eligibility meets supply, that there are enough vaccinators and that vaccination sites are “diverse so that we can reach everyone.”
“The whole basis on which we deploy vaccines must be equity-based and we are committed to that,” she said.
A main goal is to help people who are “vaccine hesitant” by educating them about the science so that they better understand the vaccine, according to Walensky.
The administration must also identify and resolve distribution issues by ensuring that the vaccine, syringes and vaccine demand are all aligned at specific sites, she said.
“We’ve been meeting daily for at least six weeks or so. So this work has already started, so we’re on the ground,” Walensky said. “The plan was not to start planning the toad. The plan is to start working today and let people know about it.”
Walensky, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, was sworn in on Wednesday when the United States reported 4,131 coronavirus-related deaths, setting a record for the highest number of COVID-19 deaths recorded in just one day.
Walensky said that at the current rate, 100,000 more coronavirus-related deaths could be expected by the middle or end of February.
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