At current rate, it’ll be 10 years before Americans adequately vaccinated against Covid

The Trump administration’s Covid-19 vaccine distribution program needs a major shot in the arm because at the current rate, it would take almost 10 years to inoculate enough Americans to get the pandemic under control, a jarring new NBC News analysis showed Tuesday.

The goal of Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership led by Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to the American public, is to ensure that 80 percent of the nation’s 330.7 million people receive the shots by late June.

In order to meet that goal, a little more than 3 million people would have to get the shots per day, the math shows.

Dec. 29, 202001:33

But so far, only about 2 million people — mostly front-line health care workers and some nursing home residents — have received their first shot of the 11.5 million doses that were delivered in the last two weeks, a review by NBC News of data from federal and state agencies showed.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to distribute the 20 million doses that were promised” this year, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner under President Donald Trump and a Pfizer board member, said Tuesday on CNBC.

“Georgia, for example just started vaccinating nursing homes yesterday, and the vaccine has been on the market, right now — been authorized for almost three weeks,” Gottlieb said. “So, we’re late getting into some of these facilities.”

But once people start getting the first shot, he said, “you will start to see an impact on the most vulnerable population, I think, soon.”

The data, Gottlieb said, shows that the vaccine “is partially protective after the first dose.”

“We don’t know exactly what the magnitude of that protection is and how long it lasts,” he said. “But there is evidence that there’s partial protection after the first dose.”

Gottlieb, who ran the FDA from 2017 until 2019, spoke out as Biden was expected to attack the Trump administration for “falling short” on the pace at which Americans are being vaccinated, according to a preview of remarks shared by a transition official Tuesday.

Dr. Celine Gounder, a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, and Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, have both warned that the U.S. will come up far short of projections by Trump administration officials that every person who wants a shot would be able to get one by the spring.

Pence, who got his first shot earlier this month, is currently on vacation in Colorado.

Trump, who for months downplayed the danger of the pandemic that has now infected more than 19.4 million people and claimed more than 336,000 lives in the U.S., had vowed in September that 100 million doses would be shipped out by the end of the year.

But in December, when the first doses were delivered, Operation Warp Speed’s top scientist, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, reduced that projection to 20 million.

“Well, we certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading epidemiologist, told CNN on Tuesday.

Dr. Brett Giroir, who is the U.S. assistant secretary for health and the Trump administration’s Covid-19 testing czar, told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday the reported 2 million shots that have already been given is “an underestimate.”

But he agreed that they won’t meet the goal of inoculating 20 million people before the New Year.

“Again, we were over the Christmas break last week, even for hospitals that slows things down,” he said. “And it’s only 15 days since the first vaccines were given.”

That said, more vaccines are getting to more people, Giroir said.

“We want to do it faster,” he said. “I’d love to have everybody vaccinated by now, we’ll have another 30 million doses in January, another 50 million doses in February, and that’s going to add up pretty quickly into impact, particularly in our vulnerable communities.”