The top infectious disease expert in the US, Anthony Fauci, called on the federal government on Thursday to deploy more resources to vaccinate Americans after the country missed its goal to get 20 million people inoculated by the end of the year.
As overworked, underfunded state public health departments scrambled to administer the vaccines, some senior citizens waited overnight to receive their first dose in Florida.
“We would have liked to see it run smoothly and have 20m doses into people today, by the end of 2020, which was the projection,” Fauci said.
“Obviously it didn’t happen, and that’s disappointing,” he told NBC in an interview.
The US failure to meets its end-of-year vaccine distribution goal comes as concerns grow about the newly identified variant of Covid-19 circulating in the UK, which was reported to have reached the US this week, with cases in Colorado and California.
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Fauci said it was “inevitable” that the new variant, called B117, would arrive in the US because of the high level of infections in the country.
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Overworked, underfunded state public health departments are scrambling to patch together plans for administering vaccines. Counties and hospitals have taken different approaches, leading to long lines, confusion, frustration and jammed phone lines.
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December has been the nation’s deadliest month since the pandemic began in early 2020, and health officials have warned January could be worse.
More than 3,740 US coronavirus deaths were reported on Wednesday in the US, the highest death toll in a day yet, surpassing a record 24 hours for deaths the day before.
Guardian
A Wisconsin hospital employee has been fired and arrested after removing dozens of vials of the coronavirus vaccine from a pharmacy refrigerator, intentionally destroying more than 500 doses, a hospital investigation found.
The incident happened over the weekend at the Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, north of Milwaukee. Grafton police announced the arrest of the pharmacist Thursday, but did not name the man or identify a motive.
NBC
What will Trump do to upstage Biden?Joe Biden plans to lead a unique nationwide memorial service on the eve of his inauguration to honor the grim toll of more than 340,000 American lives lost to the coronavirus.
The presidential inauguration committee (PIC) announced on Thursday that it would host a lighting ceremony around the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool along the National Mall in Washington, a day ahead of Biden’s swearing-in ceremony at the US Capitol.
Cities and towns across the country are invited to join the ceremony by illuminating buildings and ringing church bells at the same moment, shortly after east coast sunset on 19 January, the first publicly marked moment of national unity since the pandemic began to spread across the country earlier this year.
Guardian
UPDATE:
Police in Grafton, about 20 miles north of Milwaukee, said the Advocate Aurora Health pharmacist was arrested on suspicion of reckless endangerment, adulterating a prescription drug and criminal damage to property, all felonies. The pharmacist has been fired and police said in a news release that he was in jail.
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His motive remains unclear. Police said that detectives believe he knew the spoiled doses would be useless and people who received them would mistakenly think they’d been vaccinated when they hadn’t.
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Advocate Aurora Health Care Chief Medical Group Officer Jeff Bahr told reporters during a teleconference Thursday afternoon that the pharmacist deliberately removed 57 vials that held hundreds of doses of the Moderna vaccine from refrigeration at a Grafton medical center overnight on Dec. 24 into Dec. 25, returned them, then left them out again on the night of Dec. 25 into Saturday. The vials contained enough doses to inoculate 570 people.
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That means that the doses people received Saturday are all but useless.
Chicago Tribune
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