Operation Warp Speed at a crawl: Adequately vaccinating Americans will take 10 years at current pace
The Trump administration’s Covid-19 vaccine distribution program needs a major shot in the arm because at the current rate, it would take almost 10 years to inoculate enough Americans to get the pandemic under control, a jarring new NBC News analysis showed Tuesday.
The goal of Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership led by Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to the public, is to ensure that 80 percent of the country’s 330.7 million people get the shots by late June.
To meet that goal, a little more than 3 million people would have to get the shots each day, the math shows.
But so far, only about 2 million people — most of them front-line health care workers and some nursing home residents — have gotten their first shots of the 11.5 million doses that were delivered in the last two weeks, a review by NBC News of data from federal and state agencies showed.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to distribute the 20 million doses that were promised” this year, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under President Donald Trump and a Pfizer board member, said Tuesday on CNBC. [Continue reading…]