Only 25% of COVID-19 vaccines distributed have been administered
Just 25 percent of COVID-19 vaccinations that have been distributed across the country have been administered so far — while in New York, 31 percent of the shots received have been doled out, according to new data.
The Empire State — the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak last spring — has received 682,425 shots, according to a tally by Bloomberg and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of Thursday morning.
But only 212,880 people have gotten their first dose in the state of 19.5 million.
In New York City, 24 percent of people have gotten the first dose — 88,410 administered of the 347,525 delivered.
Worse, 7.7 percent — 167,149 — of those in long-term care programs, like nursing homes, have been vaccinated, even though about 2.2 million doses have been distributed, according to CDC data last updated on Wednesday morning.
Nationwide, 12,409,050 doses have been delivered, with 3,134,531 shots given, according to Bloomberg.
That doesn’t even come close to the 20 million Americans whom health czar Alex Azar promised to have vaccinated in December alone.
Through the Trump administration’s expedited vaccine program called Operation Warp Speed, the Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID vaccine for use on Dec. 11 and Moderna’s candidate against the bug exactly one week later.
Shipments of doses began going out quickly, just days later, with the feds leaving distribution specifics up to state officials.
The rollout has been slower than expected.
“We agree that that number is lower than what we hoped for,” Moncef Slaoui, one of the heads of Operation Warp Speed, said at a press conference Wednesday.
“We know that it should be better, and we’re working hard to make it better.”
Moderna’s two-dose vaccine must be given 28 days apart, while Pfizer and BioNTech’s is 21 days — so no American has received their second dose yet.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, called the vaccination program — the largest ever undertaken in the country — a “prodigious task.”
“We would have liked to see it run smoothly and have 20 million doses into people today by the end of 2020,” Fauci told the “Today” show Thursday.
“Obviously, it didn’t happen and that’s disappointing. Hopefully, as you get into the first couple weeks of January, the gaining of momentum will get us to the point where we want to be.”
“There really has to be a lot more effort in the sense of resources for the locals, namely the states, the cities, the counties, the places where the vaccine is actually going into the arms of individuals,” he added.
Source: New York Post
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