Vaccinations Pass 25 Million as Biden's Team Untangles Trump's Mess
The number of Americans who have received at least one Covid-19 dose exceeded 25.2 million yesterday, as the number of shots administered Friday was more than 1.5 million for the day. This includes over 1.1 million who received their first shot and almost 400,000 who received their second.
Joe Biden set a goal of 100 million in his first 100 days, but expressed hopes that vaccinations would soon be exceeding 1.5 million a day.
According to a chart in the New York Times, only 200 to 300 thousand were being vaccinated in December though the CDC did not receive daily reports for half those days. The CDC does not have any numbers for weekend days up until Biden took the oath of office. In any event, daily vaccinations were running about 800,000 in the middle of January and are currently averaging about 1.3 million.
| dates | Doses Delivered | Shots Administered | Vaccinations | Both shots | |
| 1/29 | Cum. | 49,932,850 | 29,577,902 | 24,064,165 | 5,259,693 |
| 1/30
|
Cum.
Daily |
49,933,259
+409 |
31,123,299
+1,545,397 |
25,201,143
+1,136,978 |
5,657,142
+397,449 |
The Trump team did not give the states clear information as how many doses to expect each week making scheduling difficult, and some in the White House did not want state and local governments to get the funding they needed.
WASHINGTON — Top Trump officials actively lobbied Congress to deny state governments any extra funding for the Covid-19 vaccine rollout last fall — despite frantic warnings from state officials that they didn’t have the money they needed to ramp up a massive vaccination operation.
The push, described to STAT by congressional aides in both parties and openly acknowledged by one of the Trump officials, came from multiple high-ranking Trump health officials in repeated meetings with legislators.
…As part of Operation Warp Speed, they spent billions in contracts to buy hundreds of millions of doses, and set up a rudimentary system to get vaccines to states. Parts of this are not working well at all — the Trump crew set up a partnership scheme with CVS and Walgreens to vaccinate nursing homes that has been plagued with delays, and previous HHS chief Alex Azar bizarrely lied to states about having a reserve of doses that he had already given out, causing chaos in states that had been counting on those extra shots. Many states have also jammed up the process, either through incompetence or apathy (Kansas and Alabama), meddling politicians micromanaging everything (New York), or over-complicated distribution rules (California).
Worldwide Vaccinations Are Barely Started
Blomberg News reports that about 4.5 million people are being vaccinated around the world each day with all the currently available vaccines. Israel at 30% vaccinated has been the most successful. The numbers will increase dramatically as more vaccines and doses become available.
