JOIN USJoe Biden plans big Covid vaccine push amid supply crunch
President-elect Joe Biden, racing against a surge in coronavirus cases and the emergence of a new variant that could significantly worsen the public health crisis, is planning a vaccination blitz that calls for greatly expanding access while emphasising equity in distribution, including to those in jail.
But his plan is colliding with a sobering reality: With only two federally-authorised vaccines, supplies will be scarce for the next several months, frustrating some state and local health officials who had hoped that the release of a federal stockpile of vaccine doses announced this week could alleviate that shortage. Trump administration officials clarified Friday that the existing stockpile would only go toward giving second doses to people who had already received the vaccine, and not to new groups of people.
“The vaccine rollout in the United States has been a dismal failure so far,” Biden said. “The honest truth is this, things will get worse before they get better. And the policy changes we are going to be making, they’re going to take time to show up in the Covid statistics.”
Biden said he would invoke the Defense Production Act, if necessary, to build up vaccine supply. But the team also sought to tamp down expectations. Biden said his plan, “won’t mean that everyone in these groups will get vaccinated immediately, because supply is not where it needs to be.” But, he added, it will mean that as doses become available, “we’ll reach more people who need them.”
The Biden team promised to ramp up vaccination in pharmacies and build mobile vaccination clinics to get vaccines to hard-to-reach and underserved rural and urban communities.
Like the Trump administration, Biden called for states to expand the vaccine eligibility groups to people 65 or older.
The administration will also make “programs available for high-risk settings, including homeless shelters, jails and institutions that serve individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” the fact sheet said.
As of Friday, according to the CDC, about 10.6 million people had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, and about 1.6 million had received the second dose. That is far short of the goal federal officials set to give at least 20 million people their first shots before the end of 2020.