Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir said that around 15.6 million doses of vaccines have been distributed so far across the United States, adding that 2.1 million vaccines have been administered.
“So by the end of this week, we will have distributed about 15.6 million doses to the states, that means through the Fed Ex and UPS trucks to the states,” Giroir said in an interview with MSNBC. “We announced this morning a distribution of another 4.2 plus million that will occur next week, so that by the end of next week we’ll be at about 19.9 million distributed,” he added.
“The numbers reported 2.1 million vaccines in people’s arms. We know that’s underreported because there is a 3 to 7-day delay,” Giroir said, “but we expect that to ramp up. Remember, last week with the holiday week, even in hospitals that’s slower than normal, and it’s only been 15 days since the first shot got in people’s arms. So we do expect that the ramp-up, the state plans will ramp-up over the next week or two. We expect that to accelerate.”
Earlier in the day, infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told CNN that the operation is far behind the original plan.
“We certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December, you heard talking about 40 million doses for 20 million people,” Fauci said. “Even if 2 million is an undercount, how much undercount could it be? So we are below where we want to be.”
Fauci concurred with Giroir about the belief that vaccination distribution and administration will speed up significantly during the upcoming weeks.
“I believe that as we get into January, we are going to see an increase in the momentum,” said Fauci. “Which I hope allows us to catch up to the projected pace that we had spoken of a month or two ago when we were talking about the planned roll-out of the vaccinations.”
World Health Organization (WHO) officials have warned recently that while the pandemic has been severe, there could be a more severe outbreak in the future.
“This pandemic has been very severe,” WHO emergencies chief Michael Ryan said in a press briefing. “It has spread around the world extremely quickly and it has affected every corner of this planet, but this is not necessarily the big one.”
