Pouch “Can’t reach US government target of 20 million vaccinations this year”

Anthony Pouch Director of the National Allergy and Infectious Disease Research Institute (NIAID) under the National Institutes of Health. © AFP=News1

Earlier this month, the U.S. government announced that 20 million people would be vaccinated against Corona 19, but only about 10% of them were vaccinated, the U.S. internet media Axios reported on the 29th (local time).

Anthony Pouch, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the National Institutes of Health said in an interview with CNN on the same day that “the government’s goal of inoculating 20 million people by the end of this month will not be achieved.”

“We’re not quite close to what we wanted at the end of December,” said Pouch. But he said, “I believe in January the momentum will increase enough to keep up with the vaccination rate we talked about a month or two ago.”

“I hope that the vaccine will be open to the general public after vaccinating first,” he said. “When the time comes when anyone who wants to vaccinate the vaccine can be vaccinated, it is time to change the epidemiological structure of the outbreak.”

Earlier this month, the OWS team, the White House Corona 19 vaccine development and distribution project, approved the Pfizer vaccine earlier this month and said, “We are confident that we will distribute enough quantities to allow 20 million vaccinations by the end of this month.”

However, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), only 2.1 million people received vaccinations as of 28 days. The number of vaccines distributed across the United States (11.5 million doses) did not reach the government’s vaccination target, Axios pointed out.

In this regard, President-elect Joe Biden also criticized at a press conference on the day that “about 2 million people have been vaccinated so far,” saying, “This is much less than the 20 million people Trump promised to be vaccinated by the end of this year.”

“The Trump administration’s plan to distribute the vaccine is far behind,” said Biden. “I will do my best to help us move in the right direction.” Earlier, he said he would inoculate 100 million people during the first 100 days of taking office.

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