Biden sets May for full supply of vaccine
Earlier target date for all shots comes amid J&J-Merck partnership
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden said Tuesday the U.S. expects to take delivery of enough coronavirus vaccine for all adults by the end of May — two months earlier than anticipated — and he pushed states to get at least one shot into the arms of teachers by the end of May to hasten school reopenings.
Biden also announced that drugmaker Merck will help produce rival Johnson & Johnson’s newly approved one-shot vaccine, likening the partnership between the two drug companies to the spirit of national cooperation during World War II.
“We’re now on track to have enough vaccine supply for every adult in America by the end of May,” Biden said.
Despite the stepped-up pace of vaccine production, the work of inoculating Americans could extend well into the summer, officials said, depending both on the government’s capacity to deliver doses and Americans’ willingness to roll up their sleeves.
Biden’s announcements quickly raised expectations for when the nation could safely emerge from the pandemic with the promise of speedier vaccinations, but even as he expressed optimism, Biden quickly tempered the outlook for a return to life as it was before the virus hit.
“I’ve been cautioned not to give an answer to that because we don’t
know for sure,” Biden said, before saying his hope for a return to normal was sometime before “this time next year.”
As Biden spoke, states across the country were moving to relax virus-related restrictions. This despite the objections of the White House and the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who have warned against any relaxation of virus protocols until more Americans are vaccinated.
In Texas, GOP Gov. Greg Abbott moved to lift his state’s mask-wearing mandate and a host of other limitations. Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer eased capacity limits on restaurants and both public and residential gatherings.
Fauci has previously said the nation must achieve a vaccination rate of about 80 percent to reach “herd immunity.” Only about 8 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though the pace of vaccination has been increasing. The U.S. set a new daily record for injections last Thursday and Friday.
In hopes of increasing vaccinations even further. the Biden administration told governors to make preparations to administer even more doses in the coming weeks. More shots are also headed toward the federally backed program to administer doses in retail pharmacies, which federal officials believe can double or triple their pace of vaccination.
More than 800,000 doses of the J&J vaccine will also be distributed this week to pharmacies, on top of the 2.4 million they are now getting from Pfizer and Moderna.
Those pharmacies will be key in getting the vaccines into the arms of teachers — particularly in the roughly 20 states where they have not been prioritized for shots. The aim is to help reopen schools to better educate students who have been at risk of falling behind during the pandemic and reduce the burden on parents who have had to choose between childcare and a job.
“Let’s treat in-person learning as the essential service that it is,” Biden said. Teachers will be able to sign up directly through participating retail pharmacies, the administration said.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki also announced Tuesday that the federal government was increasing supply of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to states next week to 15.2 million doses per week, up from 14.5 million previously. States will also receive 2.8 million doses of the J&J shot this week.
On a call with governors Tuesday, White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients said states should prepare to administer 16 million to 17 million total weekly doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines by the end of March, climbing to 17 million to 18 million weekly by early April. The supply of J&J doses to states, expected to dip after the initial shipment this week, will climb to 4 million to 6 million weekly doses by the end of March and 5 million to 6 million doses weekly through the end of April.
Officials have said J&J faced unexpected production issues with its vaccine and produced only 3.9 million doses before being cleared for emergency use authorization on Saturday. The company has promised to deliver 100 million doses by the end of June.
Before the approval of the J&J shot, Biden had suggested that it would take until the end of July to have enough vaccine for every adult in the U.S.
Facing questions about the company’s slipping delivery schedule, J&J Vice President Richard Nettles told lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week that the company had faced “significant challenges” because of its “highly complex” manufacturing process.
The White House said Merck would devote two plants to the production process. One would make the vaccine and the other would handle inserting the vaccine into vials and ensuring strict quality controls.
When it was first announced that a COVID-19 vaccine was authorized for emergency use by the Federal Drug Administration in the United States, the scientific community was finally able to exhale. As a Black physician and member of the scientific community, I was particularly encouraged because of the disproportionately higher rates of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 among the Hispanic, Black and Indigenous American populations.
My relief, however, was short-lived. We continue to see troubling inequities with new reports showing that many people from the minority community are among the lowest currently receiving the new vaccines, and the highest to be hesitant about its safety and effectiveness. According to Pew Research Center, just 42 percent of Black adults are inclined to get vaccinated, compared to 63 percent of white adults and 83 percent of adult Asian Americans.
The hesitation to get vaccinated is certainly understandable. Minorities have for centuries experienced egregious experimentation without consent. Examples include J. Marion Sims, who used enslaved Black women as test subjects, to the federally sponsored, the secretive Tuskegee study where treatment for syphilis was intentionally withheld, and the more recent unconsented use of tissue and cells taken from Henrietta Lacks while a cancer patient, Black America’s relationship to science and research has been in multiple instances exploitative and inhumane.
But this vaccine is not another Tuskegee. Looking at the preliminary data on who is getting vaccinated tells us that. News reports to date indicate that those who are majority persons and wealthy, including some from outside of the U.S., are quite active in pursuing vaccinations in America. National results show that Black people were inoculated at levels far below their share of the population. At the end of January, composite data shows that less than 5 percent of the vaccinations had been administered to Black people.
There is no doubt that the lack of equity in access is also playing a role in such low vaccination numbers. Currently, Black residents are significantly more likely than whites to live more than a mile from the closest vaccination facility. Online portals and phone applications have been popular tools deployed across states to schedule vaccinations. But this leaves those who fall into “digital divides” and “app gaps” behind.
However, these challenges should not be compounded with fear. Some say that they want to wait and see if anything adverse happens to others who were vaccinated. This is a reasonable initial thought, but it should be weighed against the science, the demonstrated use and the clear risks. The science, conducted in tens of thousands of people of multiple ethnicities in multiple countries, shows a strong safety profile. Moreover, unlike the Tuskegee experiments, those advocating, conducting and overseeing the vaccination studies are among the first in line to take the COVID-19 vaccine themselves. In Tuskegee, known curative treatment was withheld from Black patients. Now the effort is to deliver preventative vaccines. White Americans are getting these at disproportionate rates while underrepresented people are disproportionately bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 illnesses.
I chose to get the vaccine because I know and trust this science. At the same time, I recognize the logical concerns about the safety of the vaccine in a process that was indeed accelerated. While this vaccine was created unusually fast, the speed is the result of technological innovations that have actually been in development for two decades, supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In addition, there has been new federal economic support for more COVID-19 focused development and manufacturing processes in parallel. Now, as the country passes more than half a million dead, we have a means to stop this death toll.
Indeed, people of color have the most to lose in the fight against this virus, and therefore, the most to gain by getting vaccinated. Now we can take advantage of the very best that modern medical science has to offer. The weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly clear for all people. Everyone eligible should get the vaccine when it is available for you to do so.
To improve equity in access to the vaccine, leaders in government and all sectors of industry must work to reach our most vulnerable groups where they are located. This is working now in the extremes of Alaska, which leads the nation in vaccination rates despite much of the Native population being in remote and isolated communities. For underserved populations nationally, this means direct communication, not phone apps. It means purposeful targeting and collaborations with community churches, barber shops, Federally Qualified Health Centers and community health centers. It means vaccination hubs and providers placed in the underserved areas of Houston. It means equipping the most trusted figures in minority communities with the best information to counter the myths. And it means closely monitoring vaccination assignment and delivery to ensure equitable inclusion. For minorities, this is indeed urgent.
Pettigrew is CEO of Engineering Health and executive dean of Engineering Medicine (EnMed) at Texas A&M University and Houston Methodist Hospital. He was the founding Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and is the latest recipient of the National Science Board’s Vannevar Bush Award.