President Biden Announces New Steps to Boost Vaccine Supply and Increase Transparency for States, Tribes, and Territories.
Just over a year since the first COVID-19 case was confirmed in the United States, the nation has hit another grim milestone in the pandemic, reaching 25 million infections and counting. The pace in which this virus has spread throughout the U.S. is staggering and with new variants emerging, the spread is not slowing any time soon. That’s why it is critical that we vaccinate as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.
President Biden has a comprehensive National Action Strategy to put the pandemic behind us and he and the COVID-19 response team are aggressively implementing it. Today, the President is announcing bold steps that will help meet the goal of administering 100 million shots in 100 days and ramp up vaccine supply as fast as possible. As a result of these actions, the federal government will have enough vaccine supply for the entire U.S. population by the end of the summer.
The President is taking the following actions today:
An Increase in Weekly Vaccine Supply to States, Tribes and Territories: The Biden-Harris Administration will increase overall, weekly vaccine supply to states, Tribes and territories from 8.6 million doses to a minimum of 10 million doses. This increase of 1.4 million doses per week will allow millions more Americans to get vaccinated sooner than previously anticipated. The Administration is committing to maintaining this as the minimum supply level for the next three weeks.
Increased transparency for States, Tribes, and Territories to Help Their Vaccination Efforts: The Biden-Harris Administration is taking action to provide states, Tribes and territories with a reliable three-week supply look-ahead. The Department of Health and Human Services will provide allocation estimates for the upcoming three weeks as opposed to the one week look-ahead that they previously received. This increased transparency will give state and local leaders greater certainty around supply so that they can plan their vaccination efforts and administer vaccines effectively and efficiently.
Purchase 200 Million Additional Doses to Be Delivered This Summer, Double the Nation’s Vaccine Supply: President Biden directed his COVID-19 Response Coordinator to work with HHS to increase our total vaccine supply for the American people. The Biden-Harris Administration is working to purchase an additional 100 million doses of each of the two Food and Drug Administration-authorized vaccines – Pfizer and Moderna. This increases the total vaccine order for the U.S. by 50%, from 400 million to 600 million with these additional doses expected to deliver this summer. With these additional doses, the U.S. will have enough vaccine to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of this summer.
Presumably the manufactures are, and have been, running at capacity.
For the gov to “create” more vaccine means one or more of…
1) Various unsafe and/or criminal ways are being employed (seriously unlikely).
2) We’re taking it from vaccine that would have been sent to other countries, perhaps the 3rd world (maybe).
3) The manufacturers have increased capacity (likely but also likely planned long ago).
This really sounds like happy spin on things already in the pipeline. I suppose it’s natural for one administration to try to claim credit for things the previous one did… but it’s interesting how the media has just fallen into line with this.
There was a lot of reporting on the “disarray” that the Trump administration left the vaccination program in. Now things are fixed… almost like there never was a serious problem.
The below website shows a graph of the US’s vaccinations in terms of percentage of the population vaccinated. I see no “disarray”. I see no “fix”. I expect to see no massive bump upwards. We’re vaccinating about 2% of our population a week, that’s a little less than a million a day. We’re trending upwards so we should expect to do more than that eventually.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinationsReport
At least one of them is below capacity because they can’t get assured supplies of some of the precursor chemicals and materials. I believe the Biden administration has already invoked, quietly, the Defense Production Act to give the vaccine companies priority call on those.Report
Link? I looked for this and couldn’t find it.Report
Just read in the media that Biden’s “100 million in 100 days” is what was expected under the previous administration’s plan. Presumably the spin here is calling it an increase.Report