The top infectious disease expert in the US, Anthony Fauci, called on the federal government on Thursday to deploy more resources to vaccinate Americans after the country missed its goal to get 20 million people inoculated by the end of the year.
As overworked, underfunded state public health departments scrambled to administer the vaccines, some senior citizens waited overnight to receive their first dose in Florida.
“We would have liked to see it run smoothly and have 20m doses into people today, by the end of 2020, which was the projection,” Fauci said.
“Obviously it didn’t happen, and that’s disappointing,” he told NBC in an interview.
The US failure to meets its end-of-year vaccine distribution goal comes as concerns grow about the newly identified variant of Covid-19 circulating in the UK, which was reported to have reached the US this week, with cases in Colorado and California.
More than 14m vaccine doses had been distributed in the US, but only 2.1 million people have been vaccinated, said leaders of the federal vaccine program, Operation Warp Speed, at a Wednesday news conference.
The chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, said: “We know it should be better and we are working hard to make it better.”
Terry Beth Hadler was so eager to get vaccinated that the 69-year-old piano teacher stood in line overnight in a parking lot in Florida with hundreds of other senior citizens.
She waited 14 hours and a brawl nearly erupted before dawn on Tuesday when people cut in line outside the library in Bonita Springs where officials were offering shots on a first-come, first-served basis to those 65 or older.
“I’m afraid that the event was a super-spreader,” she said. “I was petrified.”
Overworked, underfunded state public health departments are scrambling to patch together plans for administering vaccines. Counties and hospitals have taken different approaches, leading to long lines, confusion, frustration and jammed phone lines.
A multitude of logistical concerns have complicated the process of trying to beat back the scourge that has killed over 340,000 Americans.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
