U.S. Secures More Vaccine Doses As Distribution Continues For Essential Workers
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2020
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar released a statement afterward saying the U.S. will now have enough supply "to vaccinate every American who wants it by June 2021."
Even with these announcements questions remain on how exactly everyone will get vaccinated. States are having varying levels of success with the vaccine rollout process. Dr. Jose Romero, Arkansas health secretary and chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention immunization advisory committee, discusses the success Arkansas has had with vaccine distribution and the lessons learned in the process.
In Seattle, NPR's Will Stone has been following vaccine distribution, including to health care workers who have been caring for COVID-19 patients for nearly a year.
One of the questions that remains as more people get vaccinated is should volunteers who got a placebo during the vaccine trials now be offered the real thing? NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with Dr. Steven Goodman of Stanford School of Medicine who is advising the Food and Drug Administration about this.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Let's start with some good news, shall we? |
| 0:02.0 | Apparently the White House announcing a deal to secure millions more doses of that Pfizer vaccine. |
| 0:09.0 | What? |
| 0:09.2 | Millions more doses. This morning the Trump administration agreed to buy an additional |
| 0:14.0 | 100 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, doubling the government's supply from the pharmaceutical |
| 0:20.1 | company Pfizer. Soon after, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar released a statement, |
| 0:26.7 | he said the US will now have enough supply to vaccinate every American who wants it by June 2021. |
| 0:34.8 | Now, there are questions here, because this thing stands now even with this latest deal and even |
| 0:40.0 | counting the Moderna vaccine, so far the US government has only contracted enough to immunize |
| 0:45.6 | 200 million people. Then there's the fact that this past week, many states did not get the vaccine |
| 0:52.2 | supply they expected. At the end of the day, the number of doses available to us to allocate |
| 0:57.8 | ended up being lower. US Army General Gus Perna, Chief Operating Officer of Operation Warp |
| 1:03.7 | Speed that was him offering an apology last week, he oversees the vaccine distribution effort. |
| 1:09.4 | More than a dozen states said their Pfizer allocations were cut, some by as much as 40% of what |
| 1:15.5 | they were expecting. And I want to take personal responsibility for the miscommunication. |
| 1:21.3 | Consider this, it's been more than a week since the US administered its very first coronavirus vaccine. |
| 1:28.4 | Now comes the hard work of making sure vaccines reach every corner of the country. |
| 1:36.4 | From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Wednesday, December 23rd. |
| 1:43.6 | I'm Guy Raaz and I'm NPR's How I Built This? How Tim Ferris as an entrepreneur, |
| 1:49.1 | author, investor and podcaster turned himself into a multi-million dollar brand. |
| 1:55.4 | Subscribe or listen now. |
| 1:59.9 | It's consider this from NPR. Before we go on, let's keep something in mind. We are talking about |
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