Technicians sort doses of the Pfizer vaccine at the Virginia Hospital Center on December 16, 2020 in Arlington, Virginia.The US is nowhere close to meeting the Trump administration's goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020.
Early distribution challenges also raise questions about the ability to speedily vaccinate the general population in 2021.The US is nowhere close to meeting its coronavirus vaccination goal for the end of 2020, raising concerns about how long it will take to immunize a vast majority of the American public and curb the pandemic.
"We agree that number is lower than we hoped for," Moncef Slaoui, Warp Speed's chief scientific advisor, said on the press call. "For us to reach 80% herd immunity through vaccination, it will take us 10 years at a rate of 1 million vaccines a week," she said. "Or, put in a different way, if we want to get there within six months, we have to be doing 3.5 million vaccinations a day, not 1 million a week."
The US Defense Department and Gen. Gustave Perna are leading Warp Speed's distribution plan, and states are ultimately responsible for administering the shots and deciding who gets them.In the absence of clear federal guidance, the vaccine rollout has devolved into a patchwork response that varies by state, said Dr. Marissa Levine, a public-health professor at the University of South Florida, told Business Insider.
Deferring to local authorities has defined other aspects of the US pandemic response, including ramping up testing and scrambling to secure personal protective equipment. With vaccines, however, the US has had almost a year to prepare.