Surgeon General attributes COVID-19 vaccination delays to shortages of state and local funding



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Surgeon General Dr Jerome Adams said the lack of public and local funds could be one of the reasons millions of COVID-19 vaccines distributed to states across the country have yet to be administered to patients.

Just under 3 million people have received the vaccine, despite the Trump administration’s promise to administer 20 million by the end of December.

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Yet Adams told ABC’s “Good Morning America” ​​that the federal government is “on track” to have 20 million doses of the vaccine “on the ground by the end of next week,” a storm of President Trump’s original goal.

The federal government has sought to shift the blame onto states, Trump tweeting on Wednesday for state officials to “get in motion” to distribute shots to priority candidates such as healthcare workers and elderly patients in nursing homes.

“There are vaccines made, there are vaccines assigned, there are vaccines delivered, and then there are vaccines put to arms,” Adams said.

“I used to run a public health department. People forget that we always underfunded public health decades ago. And so chronically we have to keep funding local public health better and national, ”he added.

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However, governors in several states have complained about the lack of federal funding, creating a growing gap between the number of vaccines available and the number of people who receive them.

The federal government has been criticized for confusion over the vaccine rollout, with President-elect Joe Biden criticizing Trump’s efforts to distribute the vaccines in a timely manner as “late, far behind.”

Biden said he had asked his team “to prepare a much more aggressive effort with more involvement and leadership from the federal government to get things back on track” once he took office on January 20. .

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“We will find ways to speed up the pace of vaccinations,” he said, reiterating the goal of “ensuring that 100 million vaccines have been administered by the end of the first 100 days”.

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