Biden paints rosy picture of vaccine rollout while N.Y. leaders knock ‘woeful’ supply
An optimistic President Biden painted a much rosier immunization picture than New York’s political leaders Monday, saying coronavirus vaccines will be available to anyone in the nation by spring.
While Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio warned of vaccine shortages across the city and state, the new commander-in-chief expressed confidence that supply would keep pace with demand and finally give Americans the protection they need from the disease that has ravaged the nation for almost a year.
“I feel confident that by summer we’re going to be well on our way to heading toward herd immunity, and increasing the access for people,” Biden told reporters. “I feel good about where we’re going and I think we can get it done.”
Still, Biden warned against complacency and said viable vaccines are no reason for Americans who have been wearing masks, social distancing and locking down at home to ease up on measures that are making a difference.
Biden and his coronavirus team acknowledged a still-rising number of COVID fatalities, including 1,814 on Sunday and 420,000 overall in the U.S.
Adding to the challenge are new strains that threaten to spur new outbreaks. The White House announced earlier Monday that it was restricting travel from South Africa, where a new strain has taken hold. Meanwhile, all international travelers must test negative within three days of air travel into the U.S. from abroad.
“It’s beginning to move, but I’m confident that we will beat this,” Biden said. “But we’re still going to be talking about this in the summer. We will still going to be dealing with this issue in the early fall.”
The U.S. is currently administering about 1.2 million shots a day, and Biden said he expects that will soon reach 1.5 million doses.
The president said the administration has “commitments from some of the producers that they will in fact produce more vaccine,” though he didn’t say which companies.
The production can’t come fast enough for New York City, which is unlikely to reach de Blasio’s goal of administering 1 million COVID vaccine doses by the end of the month.
The mayor announced the target at the end of 2020, saying, “We’re making clear to the whole world we can achieve a million vaccinations in January.”
But since then, the federal government has shipped fewer doses than expected. Cuomo and de Blasio weren’t on the same page as to who could get the vaccine, and New Yorkers complained of a confusing process to get vaccinated.
The city had administered 628,831 doses as of Sunday, according to the mayor, and was expecting a new shipment of 107,000 doses in the coming days.
Even if the city were to administer all of the doses it gets this week, along with more than 19,000 “first” doses on hand as of Monday morning, it would fall some 250,000 doses short of de Blasio’s goal.
He insisted the 1 million mark would have been reachable were it not for a slow federal rollout and poor planning over administering the shots.
“It was not rhetorical in the least; it was an absolutely factual statement,” de Blasio said of his million doses goal, adding that the city “ran into the buzz saw of lack of supply and lack of flexibility of how we use the supply we have.”
Cuomo, meanwhile, gave a good news-bad news assessment of the inoculation process. He said immunization rates among New York’s health care workers are on the rise, but the state’s supply of COVID vaccines remains woefully low.
So far, the state has administered 1.5 million doses. A total of 7 million of the state’s 19 million people are currently eligible to be vaccinated.
“The entirety of our week six allocation was delivered to providers yesterday and already New York has administered 91% of its first doses” Cuomo said. “Week after week what we find is, demand for the vaccine and our ability to distribute it quickly outpaces the federal supply. This will continue to happen unless we see an increase to our weekly allocation.”
