The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted today that the US doesn’t have enough COVID-19 vaccines to meet states’ needs, even as New York and Georgia desperately plead for more doses to inoculate their populations.
‘We don’t have as many doses as we would like now for states like New York, for other states claiming to have run out of the vaccine,’ Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on Fox News Sunday.
‘Right now, that is the pressure point that I am feeling and by the end of March or so I really do hope our production scale has scaled up dramatically and that we actually have way more than we have right now,’ she added.
Walensky, 51, an infectious-diseases specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, was sworn in Wednesday as the new director of the CDC, inheriting a massive public health crisis.
Her message comes after Gov. Andrew Cuomo said over the weekend New York was running out of vaccines and as Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp also asked for more shots to keep up with the demand.
On Sunday the nation surpassed the grim milestone of more than 25million COVID infections and more than 417,900 deaths recorded since the start of the pandemic.
President Biden has promised 100 million doses of the vaccine in the first 100 days of his office, but at that rate it wouldn’t inoculate the entire country by the end of the year.
‘Yes, we have to go faster…I think the supply is going to be the most limiting constraint early on,’ Walensky said.
As of Saturday, America surpassed its target of administering one million vaccine shots a day with 1.06m.
‘We’re really hoping that after the first 100 days we’ll have much more production, not just for these two vaccines, but we’re hopeful we’ll have another one from Johnson & Johnson in the weeks ahead and perhaps a fourth one coming down the pipeline. So we’re really hoping that we’ll have more vaccine and that will increase the pace at which we can do the vaccinations,’ she added.
When asked what the distribution problem Biden’s administration inherited from Trump’s handling of the pandemic, she said: ‘I would say one of the biggest problems right now is I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have.’
‘If I can’t tell that to you then I can’t tell it to the governors and I can’t tell it to the state health officials. If they don’t know how much vaccine they’re getting, not just this week but next week and the week after, they can’t plan. They can’t figure out how many sites to roll out, how many vaccinators they need and how many appointments to make for the public,’ Walensky said.
‘The fact that we don’t know today, five days into this administration and weeks into planning how much vaccine we have, just gives you a sense of the challenges we’ve been left with,’ she added.
Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is one of the local leaders pleading for more vaccine doses for their states.
‘We need more. I think you’ve been hearing that from all the states as they’ve gotten ramped up, we’re getting to the point where we can’t really do more until we get more doses,’ he said on Fox News on Saturday.
‘Thankfully we’re almost done with our long-term facilities in the states so that’s gonna free up about 40,000 extra doses a week that we can continue giving to those over 65, which we expanded to that criteria before the CDC did, so we can continue to move the needle and get the vaccine out as soon as possible,’ he added.
On Friday Cuomo called on Biden ‘to do whatever he can to increase the supply’ saying the state’s vaccine stockpile was running so low it ‘may already be exhausted.’