It seems logistics will need to be improved and that supply will not be the
bigger problem.
Bob Kasprak----------------------------------------------------
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Russell <ericprussell@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: uupretirees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <uupretirees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wed, Feb 17, 2021 8:00 am
Subject: [uupretirees] Vaccine delivery
#yiv1874310918 P {margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;}From the NYT. Eric
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| 6:30 AM (1 hour ago) | | |
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| View in browser|nytimes.com |
| February 17, 2021 |
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| | By David Leonhardt |
| Good morning. We look at the need to accelerate the U.S. vaccination program.
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| People receiving vaccines at a community center in the Bronx yesterday.James
Estrin/The New York Times |
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Three million shots a day
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| The Biden administration has been quite cautious in setting its public
vaccination goals. |
| During the transition, officials said they hoped to give shots to one million
Americans per day — a level the Trump administration nearly reached in its
final days, despite being badly behind its own goals. In President Biden’s
first week in office, he raised the target to 1.5 million, although his aides
quickly added that it was more of a “hope” than a “goal.” Either way, the
country is now giving about 1.7 million shots per day. |
| I have spent some time recently interviewing public-health experts about what
the real goal should be, and I came away with a clear message: The Biden
administration is not being ambitious enough about vaccinations, at least not
in its public statements. |
| An appropriate goal, experts say, is three million shots per day — probably
by April. At that pace, half of adults would receive their first shot by April
and all adults who wanted a shot could receive one by June, saving thousands of
lives and allowing normal life to return by midsummer. |
| Biden struck a somewhat more ambitious tone yesterday, telling CNN that
anybody who wanted a vaccine would be able to get one “by the end of July.” But
Dr. Anthony Fauci also said that the timeline for when the general population
could receive shots was slipping from April to May or June. |
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The shots are on their way
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| The key fact is that the delivery of vaccine doses is on the verge of
accelerating rapidly. Since December, Moderna and Pfizer have delivered fewer
than one million shots per day to the government. |
| But over the next month and a half, the two companies have promised to
deliver at least three million shots per day — and to accelerate the pace to
about 3.3 million per day starting in April. Johnson & Johnson is likely to add
to that total if, as expected, it receives the go-ahead to start distributing
shots in coming weeks. |
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| Source: New York Times estimate |
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| Very soon, the major issue won’t be supply. It will be logistics: Can the
Biden administration and state and local governments administer the shots at
close to the same rate that they receive them? |
| “I’m not hearing a plan,” Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at Baylor College
of Medicine, told me. “In the public statements, I don’t hear that sense of
urgency.” |
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Bankers’ hours for vaccine clinics
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| The experts I interviewed said they understood why Biden had set only modest
public goals so far. Manufacturing vaccines is complex, and falling short of a
high-profile goal would sew doubt during a public-health emergency, as Barry
Bloom, a Harvard immunologist, told me. If he were president, Bloom added, he
would also want to exceed whatever goal was appearing in the media. |
| But setting aside public relations, experts say that the appropriate goal is
to administer vaccine shots at roughly the same rate that drug makers deliver
them — with a short delay, of a week or two, for logistics. Otherwise, millions
of doses will languish in storage while Americans are dying and the country
remains partially shut down. |
| “We should be doing more,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns
Hopkins, said. “I am kind of surprised by how constrained we’ve been.” Many
vaccine clinics operate only during business hours, she noted. And the
government has not done much to expand the pool of vaccine workers — say, by
training E.M.T. workers. |
| The newly contagious variants of the virus add another reason for urgency.
They could cause an explosion of cases in the spring, Hotez said, and lead to
mutations that are resistant to the current vaccines. But if the vaccines can
crush the spread before then, the mutations may not take hold. |
| “We need to be laser focused on getting as many people vaccinated now as
possible,” Dr. Paul Sax, a top infectious-disease official at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital in Boston, told me. |
| As my colleague Katie Thomas, who covers the vaccines, said: “The future
looks bright — if we can do vaccination quickly enough, if people actually want
the vaccines and if the variants don’t mess with the plan.” |
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‘Our historic moment of crisis’
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| Nobody doubts that vaccinating three million Americans every day for months
on end would be a herculean task. |
| When I asked Biden about his virus plan during a December phone call, he used
the term “logistical nightmare” to describe a rapid national vaccination
program. “This is going to be one of the hardest and most costly challenges in
American history,” he said. |
| Since then, his aides have emphasized the challenges — the possibility of
manufacturing problems, the difficulty of working with hundreds of local
agencies, the need to distribute vaccines equitably. They also point out that
they have nearly doubled the pace of vaccination in their first month in
office, accelerated the pace of delivery from drugmakers and have plans to do
more, like open mass-vaccination clinics and expand the pool of vaccine
workers. |
| Part of me wonders whether the White House knows that three million shots per
day is the right goal and simply doesn’t want to say so. |
| When Biden and his advisers talk about the fight against Covid-19, they
sometimes compare it to wartime mobilization. And the U.S. has accomplished
amazing logistical feats during wartime. A single Michigan auto plant figured
out how to manufacture a new B-24 bomber plane every hour during World War II,
and a network of West Coast factories built one warship per day — for four
years. |
| “This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge,” Biden said during his
inaugural address. “We have never, ever, ever failed in America when we have
acted together.” |
| Near the end of the speech, he added a question: “Will we rise to the
occasion |
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