Florida: Hard Rock Stadium to be vaccination center 0:30
(CNN) -
Nearly four weeks after the first American was vaccinated against the coronavirus, about 6 million people have received one of the vaccines, well below the vaccination target.
against covid-19., set last year, from 20 million by the end of 2020, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As of Thursday, 5.9 million people had received a vaccine, up from 5.3 the day before, the CDC said.
The US chief health officer said this week that the United States is averaging about half a million vaccines a day.
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While the 20 million target may have been too high to begin with, the holidays may have caused delays, some health experts said, and there may be a delay in reporting vaccines.
"It got off to a slow start and we need to do better at all levels, but I think we will gain momentum as we move beyond the holiday season into the first weeks of January," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute. of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, to Newsday's Randi Marshall this week at a virtual event.
Fauci cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the timing of the vaccine delivery in such a short period of time, saying "we've just started."
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Still, while a lot of money and effort has gone into developing vaccines and distributing them in the states, it appears that less has been invested in how to administer them, public health experts said.
“There seems to have been a notion in Washington that, wow, you have all these public health people out there.
All you have to do is send in the vaccine, ”said William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University.
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"I'm having memories of what happened to the tests," said Dr. Leana Wen, visiting professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken School of Public Health and a CNN medical analyst.
“It is the same, that initially promises were made that were based on optimistic projections.
Everyone assumed there was a national strategy when, as it turns out, there wasn't.
State and local health departments are already overburdened and "have not had the resources they need to plan and implement the most ambitious COVID-19 vaccination program our country has ever undertaken," Wen said.
Those departments "have been running all the other aspects of pandemic operations, like testing, contact tracing, public education, data tracking, and now they add this huge responsibility to this responsibility, so they have been saying for months that they need additional support ».
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Add to that the fact that "the public health infrastructure in the United States has been shrinking for about 15-20 years," Schaffner said.
How to increase the rate of vaccination against covid-19?
The federal government can do several things to speed up the vaccination process, Wen said, including instilling a sense of urgency and “(making) clear that this is a wartime mobilization.
That requires a national effort that is 24/7, there are no excuses there.
Schaffner agreed.
"You can vaccinate on Saturdays, you can vaccinate on Sundays, you can start at 6 am," Schaffner said.
«You can go until 8 or 9 at night.
So the more you can vaccinate, the better.
Second, Wen said, the government could set targets for Covid-19 vaccination, determine what state and local officials need to meet the targets, and help them get what they need.
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And the government could help streamline the Covid-19 vaccination process, staffing vaccination centers and establishing mass vaccination sites.
"Everything the federal government can do must be done, specifically the staff," Wen said.
Mass vaccination clinics against COVID-19, in parking lots, for example, would be a way to eventually speed up everyone's vaccination, said LJ Tan, chief strategy officer for the Immunization Action Coalition, which works to increase immunization rates.
With the flu, "we know that if you do a really well-done mass immunization clinic, you can easily eliminate 20,000 vaccines a day," Tan said. The rate of the coronavirus vaccine would not be that high due to the required waiting time after administer the vaccine to make sure there is no allergic reaction, he said.
