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Senior U.S. health officials have urged states to start immunizing people more widely, acknowledging that the vaccination rollout has been slower than expected and turning on the tap to a wider range of Americans to begin to roll out. vaccinate.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, on a call with reporters on Wednesday, accused the introduction of Covid-19 vaccines during the holidays and state plans too detailed to hamper the vaccination campaign . He urged governors to vaccinate more elderly people and other high-risk populations to prevent injections from staying in freezers.
Photographer: Micah Green / Bloomberg
If the governors “use all the vaccine that is allocated, ordered, shipped, distributed, they put it into the arms of health care providers, that’s great,” Azar said. “But if for some reason their distribution is difficult and they have vaccines in freezers, then you should definitely open Until 70 and over, 65 and over. You need to make sure that nursing home patients are vaccinated.
About 5.2 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. have been administered in the United States since mid-December, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. This represents about 31% of the doses distributed so far, according to the Bloomberg tracker.
Accelerated plans
Azar and other Operation Warp Speed officials said they expected vaccinations to start ramping up, although they declined to provide the number of vaccines given daily and how many of vaccines they expect to be administered by the end of the month. National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins earlier Wednesday in an interview with the Washington Post said he expected the United States to give about 1 million strokes a day, a number to which those responsible for Operation Warp Speed comment refused.
HHS has announced that it will give $ 3 billion to states, territories and some cities to support Covid-19 vaccinations. The department will also provide $ 19.1 billion to jurisdictions for testing, contact tracing and other pandemic mitigation measures.
Azar said the administration has looked at the factors that have slowed the deployment in recent weeks. Operation Warp Speed will leverage its partnership with more than a dozen drugstore chains ahead of schedule to ramp up vaccinations. Azar said states can start sending doses to participating sites.
(Updates with additional details in the last two paragraphs.)
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