More than 70 percent of COVID-19 vaccines have gone unused, still sitting in freezers US health officials said on Monday.
In Daytona Beach, hundreds of senior citizens camped out in their vehicles in chilly overnight temperatures in the low 40s to secure a place in a vaccination line Tuesday morning, a day after seniors jammed the roads to the vaccination site, NBC Miami reported.
While Surgeon General Jerome Adams on Tuesday admitted that the largest vaccination campaign in US history, which has been in the works for months, has been “a little mess,” he blamed states not moving fast enough.
“Many folks — and I’ve been to states all across the country — feel beholden to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices guidelines to vaccinate everyone in group 1A before they move to 1B and beyond,” Adams said Tuesday on the “Today” show, referring to health care and nursing home workers and front-line essential workers who are first in line for the shots.
Adams advised states and governors to speed up the process by moving to the next priority groups if demand wasn’t being met, noting that in Ohio, nursing home workers have refused to get the vaccine.
“What I want people to know these are guidelines, we’ve been telling these states since September we need to make sure we’re prioritizing getting everyone vaccinated as quickly as possible, while trying to adhere to the guidelines,” he said.
According to the New York Post, “New York officials are looking to expand access to the vaccine by using senior-citizen and recreational centers. More than 934,000 vaccines have been sent to the state, once the heart of the pandemic last spring, but just 299,428 people have gotten their first jab, according to CDC data.”
In California, just 1.1 percent of its 39.5 million residents — or 456,980 — have received the first shot of the COVID vaccine.
Texas has administered just 32 percent of the 1.3 million vaccines it received.
Dr Anthony Fauci was more optimistic about the slow pace, saying the US could soon be giving at least a million vaccinations a day.
‘Any time you start a big program, there´s always glitches. I think the glitches have been worked out,’ Fauci told The Associated Press.