Feds won’t send more vaccines to Michigan
White House COVID-19 senior adviser says that would be like playing ‘whack-a-mole’
DETROIT – The federal government will not change its COVID-19 vaccine distribution strategy, “playing whack-amole,” by sending more doses to Michigan, said Andy Slavitt, White House senior adviser for COVID-19 response, during a Monday morning news briefing.
Michigan is in the midst of another massive spike in coronavirus cases, with the worstin-the-nation infection rate and soaring hospitalizations that have forced some hospitals to postpone non-urgent surgeries and other procedures as they hit capacity.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Michigan can’t vaccinate its way out of the current surge.
“We know that if vaccines go in arms today, we will not see an effect of those vaccines, depending on the vaccine, for somewhere between two to six weeks,” Walensky said. “So, when you have an acute situation, an extraordinary number of cases like we have in Michigan, the answer is not necessarily give vaccines.
“In fact, we know that the vaccine will have a delayed response. The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer and to shut things down, to flatten the curve, to decrease contact with one another, to test to the extent that we have available, to contact trace.”
But the state is not shutting down.
Rather, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has repeatedly said Michigan’s third surge is “not a public policy problem,” but rather one driven by more contagious variants of the virus, youth sports and activity among people who are not heeding public health recommendations of avoiding large gatherings, wearing masks and keeping a safe social distance.
Whitmer pleaded with President Joe Biden and other federal leaders last week to surge vaccines to the state and asked Michiganders to voluntarily refrain from youth sports and from eating indoors at restaurants; high schools statewide were also asked to switch to virtual learning for 14 days after spring break to try to limit the spread of the virus, which has been driven by outbreaks in schools and among younger, largely unvaccinated Michiganders.
Walensky said those activities should be shut down.
“What we need to do in those situations is shut things down,” Walensky said Monday. “I think if we tried to vaccinate our way out of what is happening in Michigan, we would be disappointed that it took so long for the vaccine to work, to actually have the impact.”
What’s happening in Michigan, Slavitt suggested, could be a harbinger for what’s to come in other parts of the nation.
“We have to remember the fact that, in the next two to six weeks, the variants that we have seen in Michigan, those variants are also present in other states,” Slavitt said. “So, our ability to vaccinate people quickly in each of those states rather than taking vaccines and shifting it to playing whack-amole isn’t the strategy that public health leaders and scientists have laid out.
“There are other things that we can do. We have offered to surge monoclonal antibodies, testing, there’s a CDC team on the ground. We just announced 140 FEMA vaccinators have just moved in. … Those are things you can do quickly and we believe we can ramp things up quickly.”
Slavitt said some vaccines in Michigan aren’t being used efficiently and there are “excess vaccine (doses) in some parts of the state. So we’re going to help work with the state, and any state quite frankly, to help in the rebalancing which occurs in a situation like this.”