First modification: 03/01/2021 – 18:42Last modification: 03/01/2021 – 18:40
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Washington (AFP)
The vaccination campaign against covid-19 in the United States is gaining pace and will be able to comply with one million injections per day, officials said this Sunday, in the face of criticism for the initial delay in a country with almost 350,000 deaths.
“There were a couple of flaws, that’s understandable,” the government’s top scientific advisor, Anthony Fauci, told ABC. He added that “starting a mass vaccination program and starting it off on the right foot” was always going to have challenges.
The United States Medical Director, Jerome Adams, told CNN that the vaccines had started in a difficult context: in the midst of an explosion in the number of cases and at the time of the end of the year holidays, which put tests already saturated medical equipment.
The government of Donald Trump had promised that 20 million people would be vaccinated by the end of the year, but currently just over 4.2 million received the first dose of two that involves inoculation with the two vaccines authorized in the country, already be it Pfizer-BioNTech or Modern, always according to data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC, for its acronym in English).
“The good news is that we’re seeing (the pace) pick up fast thanks to our partners in the states,” Adams said. “In the last 72 hours, 1.5 million first injections have been given (…), which is equivalent to 500,000 a day.”
“It is much more than it was at the beginning,” Fauci said for his part. “We can get to a million a day,” he added confidently. “We have run massive vaccination programs in our history. There is no reason why we can’t do this today. … We can do it.”
The scientist estimated that after the priority ones, the general population could begin to be vaccinated “at the end of March or the beginning of April”, at a rate of at least one million people per day, then herd immunity could be achieved “at the end of the summer “boreal.
Trump nevertheless decided to respond with tweets. And he dismissed the death toll.
“The number of cases and deaths from the China Virus is greatly exaggerated in the United States by the ridiculous counting method of @CDCgov compared to other countries, many of which, maliciously, report very inaccurate and low figures. ‘ Call it Covid ‘. Fake News! “
But Adams, who was nominated for the job by Trump himself, said he had no reason to question the CDC figures across the country.
Fauci said for his part that “those are real numbers, real people and real deaths.”
© 2021 AFP
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