Trump officials announce major changes to speed up vaccinations.
WASHINGTON — Facing a slower-than-hoped coronavirus vaccine rollout, the Trump administration abruptly shifted gears Tuesday to speed the delivery of shots to more people. The move came as cases and deaths surged to alarming new highs.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced major changes to increase supply of vaccines, extend eligibility to more seniors and provide more locations for people to get shots. Administration officials describing the new policies conveyed a notable sense of urgency.
One change will have some teeth to it. Azar said going forward the federal government will base each state’s allocation of vaccines partly on how successful states have been in administering those already provided.
“If you are not using vaccines that you have the right to, then we should be rebalancing to states that are using that vaccine,” Azar said at news conference. That won’t happen overnight, not until officials try to sort out whether lags in reporting could be the reason forwhat appears to be subpar performance.
Azar also said the government will stop holding back the required second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech andModerna vaccines, practically doubling supply. Both those shots require two doses to achieve optimum protection.
Additionally, Washington is urging states to immediately start vaccinating other groups lower down the priority scale, including people age 65 and older and younger people with certain health problems.
Themove toincrease the supply of vaccines better aligns the outgoing administration with the new Biden-Harris team. On Friday, President-elect Joe Biden said he will rapidly release most available vaccine doses to protect more people. He said he supported immediately releasing vaccines that health authorities were holding back out of caution, to guarantee theywould be available for people needing their second dose.
“This next phase reflects the urgency of the situation,” said Azar. “Every vaccine dose sitting in a warehouse rather than going into an arm could mean one more death that could have been avoided.”
Initially the government had been holding back seconddoses as a safety precaution against potential shortfalls in production. Now, officials say they are confident the needed supply will be there. And people needing a second dosewill have priority.
Azar also gave states the green light to designate more places where people can get shots. Those locations can include tens of thousands of pharmacies, federally supported community health centers that serve low-income communities, and mass vaccination sites already being set up in some states.
As ofMondaymorning, the government had distributed about 27.7 million doses to states, U.S. territories and major cities. But only about 9.3 million people had received their first shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s online tracker. Thatmeans only about 34 percent of the available vaccines had been administered.
Each state has its own plan for who should be vaccinated, based on CDC recommendations that gave first priority to health care workers and nursing home residents. Some critics say the administration’s planning should have extended into helping states administer the shots after they were delivered. Congress has recently approved more than $8 billion for that.
The slow pace of the vaccine rollout has frustratedmany Americans at a time when the coronavirus death toll has continued to rise. More than 376,000 people in the U.S. have died, according to the Johns Hopkins database.
Azar said the pace of vaccinations has picked up, on track to reach 1 million daily within a couple of weeks. But the American Hospital Association estimates 1.8 million vaccinations a day are needed, seven days a week, to achieve widespread immunity by the middle of this year. Biden has set a goal of 100 million shots administered in his first 100 days.
Biden, who has been highly critical of the Trump administration’s pandemic response, is expected to give a speech Thursday outlining his plans.