Although the nation has been through enough over the past year that President Joe Biden can be said to have many different priority issues requiring his attention, if any one of them is at the forefront, it’s the COVID-19 pandemic.
With that in mind, it’s hardly a coincidence that after his initial run of executive orders reversing a variety of Trump administration policies, many of the ones unveiled the following day were directly related to the government’s coronavirus response .
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But while two of the most significant orders have directed FEMA to establish vaccination centers throughout the country and reimburse each state’s National Guard for any resources used in doing so, it’s clear that health officials will need some backup to get these plans off the ground.
Although President Biden made his COVID-19 response plans official with his January 21 executive orders, he had outlined the broad strokes of it before he even took office.
As Reuters reported on January 15, he intended at the time to use the Defense Production Act to ramp up the production of materials needed to administer the vaccine and to establish thousands of vaccination centers where the shots would be administered by retired doctors.
And after getting the ball rolling on vaccination centers last week, it seems Biden’s adminstration is laying the groundwork for retired health care workers to join the fight against the virus.
On the night of January 27, MSNBC senior producer Kyle Griffin tweeted out an announcement that the government has directed health officials to make it easier for both retired and working doctors to serve American communities.
According to United Press International (UPI), this comes in the form of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services changing its rules to allow retired doctors to administer the COVID-19 vaccine as well as to allow licensed health care workers to do so across state lines.
As White House COVID-19 Response coordinator Jeff Zients said, “This action by HHS today will help get more vaccinators in the field.”
The government is now working towards the target of setting up 100 of these vaccination centers through the month of February.
As UPI reported, this ongoing plan is launching in concert with other strategies such as delivering vaccines directly to pharmacies, establishing mobile vaccination clinics to serve the nation’s most vulnerable communities, and increasing production of “low-dead space syringes” intended to get an extra dose out of each vial of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
With these strategies, the Biden administration aims to have vaccines distributed to states at a minimum rate of 10 million doses per week.
Indeed, it seems they will need to pull out all the stops to meet the threshold of over 500 million doses needed to ensure every American over 16 receives the needed two-dose regimen to protect themselves from the coronavirus.
The government’s plan also doesn’t account for any boost in supplies that could come from the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines.
According to UPI, this because neither of these vaccines have been approved in the United States yet and the Biden administration is not operating on the assumption that they soon will be.
As Andrew Slavitt — a senior advisor to the White House COVID-19 Response Team — said, “We are not counting on things that are not in existence today. Our plan will be to make sure that we prepare for as many contingencies as exist.”
But while it’s clear that there remains a tough road ahead for the nation’s COVID-19 response, there are some causes for relief.
As UPI reported, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are still capable of dealing with the mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that have recently emerged in the United Kingdom and South Africa.
Although the South African variant has yet to appear in the United States, it has caused some alarm for its apparent resistance to existing vaccines.
But in Dr. Fauci’s words, “However, and this is an important however, it still is well within the cushion of protection. You could diminish the vaccine-induced antibody efficacy by a few-fold and still be within the protective range of the vaccine.”
Further positive news comes from the nation’s progress in meeting Biden’s goal of delivering 100 million doses of the vaccine within the first 100 days of his administration.
According to UPI, 23.5 million doses have already been administered and 3.4 million Americans have received both required doses by the time of this writing.
Furthermore, both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have shown a promising safety record thus far, with a respective rate 2.1 and 6.2 cases of anaphylactic shock per million doses.
If it’s hard to put that number in perspective, it may help to know that the death rate for COVID-19 among Americans is 16,500 for every million cases.
