Fauci calls for extra resources as US misses Covid vaccination target

The top infectious disease expert in the US, Anthony Fauci, called on the federal government on Thursday to deploy more resources to vaccinate Americans after the country missed its goal to get 20 million people inoculated by the end of the year.

As overworked, underfunded state public health departments scrambled to administer the vaccines, some senior citizens waited overnight to receive their first dose in Florida.

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“We would have liked to see it run smoothly and have 20m doses into people today, by the end of 2020, which was the projection,” Fauci said.

“Obviously it didn’t happen, and that’s disappointing,” he told NBC in an interview.

The US failure to meets its end-of-year vaccine distribution goal comes as concerns grow about the newly identified variant of Covid-19 circulating in the UK, which was reported to have reached the US this week, with cases in Colorado and California.

More than 14m vaccine doses had been distributed in the US, but only 2.1 million people have been vaccinated, said leaders of the federal vaccine program, Operation Warp Speed, at a Wednesday news conference.

The chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, said: “We know it should be better and we are working hard to make it better.”

Terry Beth Hadler was so eager to get vaccinated that the 69-year-old piano teacher stood in line overnight in a parking lot in Florida with hundreds of other senior citizens.

She waited 14 hours and a brawl nearly erupted before dawn on Tuesday when people cut in line outside the library in Bonita Springs where officials were offering shots on a first-come, first-served basis to those 65 or older.

“I’m afraid that the event was a super-spreader,” she said. “I was petrified.”

Overworked, underfunded state public health departments are scrambling to patch together plans for administering vaccines. Counties and hospitals have taken different approaches, leading to long lines, confusion, frustration and jammed phone lines.

A multitude of logistical concerns have complicated the process of trying to beat back the scourge that has killed over 340,000 Americans.

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, noted the vaccine supply was limited.

“It may not be today for everyone, may not be next week. But over the next many weeks, as long as we continue getting the supply, you’re going to have the opportunity to get this,” he said on Wednesday.

Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), said to ramp up vaccine distribution, the federal government needs to provide more resources to the local governments tasked with administering the vaccine.

“Namely, the states, the cities, the counties, the places where the vaccine is actually going into the arms of individuals,” Fauci said. “We have to support the local groups, the states and the cities to help them get this task done.”

Ashish Jha, a health policy researcher and dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, echoed Fauci in pointing out that states are not getting adequate financial or technical support from the federal government.

Jha said the Trump administration, principally the Department of Health and Human Services, has set states up to fail.

“There’s a lot states still need to do,” he said. “But you need a much more active role from the federal government than what they have been willing to do. They’ve largely said to states, ‘This is your responsibility. Figure it out.”’

James McCarthy, the chief physician executive at Memorial Hermann in Houston, said the hospital system there had administered about half of the roughly 30,000 doses that it has received since 15 December.

The system had to create a complicated plan from scratch.

“We can’t just hand it out like candy,” McCarthy said.

More details and concerns over new variant

California this week became the second state, after Colorado, to report finding a new variant of the virus that was first confirmed in the United Kingdom.

The patient, who developed symptoms on 27 December, is a 30-year-old San Diego county man who didn’t have any history of travel, which could indicate that someone else already had brought the new variant into the state, officials said.

Although the new variant had not been found in the US until this week, the CDC said it was probably already circulating through the country. Concerns have been raised that it could already be widespread, and too late to stop.

It is common for viruses to undergo minor changes as they reproduce and move through a population. Scientists have found no evidence that the variant is more lethal or causes more severe illness, and they believe the vaccines now being dispensed will be effective against it. But the fear is that mutations at some point will become significant enough to defeat the vaccines.

Fauci said it was “inevitable” that the new variant, called B117, would arrive in the US because of the high level of infections in the country.

“The good news is that it does not appear to be more virulent, namely making people more sick and leading to more deaths,” Fauci added.

The US has had 19.7m recorded cases of Covid-19 and more than 342,400 people have died from the infection, according to Johns Hopkins University, significantly more than any other country.

December has been the nation’s deadliest month since the pandemic began in early 2020, and health officials have warned January could be worse.

More than 3,740 US coronavirus deaths were reported on Wednesday in the US, the highest death toll in a day yet, surpassing a record 24 hours for deaths the day before.

California is currently experiencing the nation’s worst surge. This week the state passed a grim milestone, becoming the third state, behind New York and Texas, to surpass 25,000 deaths. In hard-hit Los Angeles county, deaths have now topped 10,000, and hospitals are struggling to handle an influx of patients.

The US has recorded more coronavirus cases and deaths than any other country. On Tuesday, the president-elect, Joe Biden, criticized the Trump administration’s vaccine distribution efforts.

Fauci said vaccine distribution would probably ramp up in the first weeks of January.

“Hopefully as we look forward to 2021, as we get well into the year, with a combination of vaccines and proper adherence to public health measures, we can end this thing and crush it, the same way we have done with other outbreaks like polio and measles and other important infectious disease,” Fauci said. “So that’s the aim and hopefully we’ll accomplish it.”