The Trump administration's Covid-19 vaccine distribution program needs a
major shot in the arm because at the current rate, it would take almost
10 years to inoculate enough Americans to get the pandemic under
control, a jarring new NBC News analysis showed Tuesday.

The goal of Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership led by
Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective
Covid-19 vaccines to the public, is to ensure that 80 percent of the
country's 330.7 million people get the shots by late June.

To meet that goal, a little more than 3 million people would have to get
the shots each day, the math shows.
U.S. falling short of goal to vaccinate 20 million people by end of year
Dec. 29, 202001:33

But so far, only about 2 million people — most of them front-line health
care workers and some nursing home residents — have gotten their first
shots of the 11.5 million doses that were delivered in the last two
weeks, a review by NBC News of data from federal and state agencies showed.

"I don't think we're going to be able to distribute the 20 million doses
that were promised" this year, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner
of the Food and Drug Administration under President Donald Trump and a
Pfizer board member, said Tuesday on CNBC.

Dr. Celine Gounder, a member of Biden's Covid-19 advisory board, and Dr.
Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health,
have warned that the U.S. will come up far short of projections by Trump
administration officials that every person who wants a shot would be
able to get one by the spring.

Pence, who got his first shot this month, is on vacation in Colorado. In
a statement, Operation Warp Speed spokesman Michael Pratt insisted that
"there is an expected lag between shots going into arms and the data
being reported."

Trump, who for months downplayed the danger of the pandemic, which has
infected more than 19.4 million people and claimed more than 336,000
lives in the U.S., vowed in September that 100 million doses would be
shipped out by the end of the year.

But in December, when the first doses were delivered, Operation Warp
Speed's top scientist, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, cut the projection to 20 million.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's leading epidemiologist, told CNN on
Tuesday, "Well, we certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be
at the end of December."


from CNBC


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