Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks at a White House press conference conducted by White House press officer Jen Psaki in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on Jan. 21, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong | Getty Images
The winter storm and power outages across Texas pose a “significant” problem for the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to the White House, Thursday.
“Well, it’s clearly a problem. It’s slowed down in places and comes to a halt,” Fauci said during an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “We’ll just have to catch up as soon as the weather rises a little bit, the ice melts and we can get the trucks and the people out.”
“It’s significant when you have that strip of land … that is really immobilized in many ways,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The Biden administration is working to accelerate the pace of vaccinations in the US after a slower-than-expected rollout under former President Donald Trump. However, the winter storm ravaging Texas is causing some shipments of Covid-19 vaccines to be delayed and vaccination sites to be temporarily closed.
According to PowerOutage.us, nearly half a million Texans are still without power as of Thursday morning, after the state’s power grid failed to keep up with heat demand during record low temperatures, causing more than 4 million outages. Millions of people are still under boiling water, according to The Weather Channel.
The severe weather has disrupted service at the FedEx hub in Memphis and caused delays in packages in the US, the company said earlier this week. UPS Worldport’s package hub in Louisville, Kentucky, and another regional hub in Dallas have since reopened after a temporary shutdown Monday night due to weather.
It’s unclear how this will affect the three new community vaccination centers, in Dallas, Arlington and Houston, that the Biden government wants to help build. Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden’s Covid Tsar, told reporters last week that the centers would be up and running by the week of Feb. 22, allowing suppliers to administer more than 10,000 shots a day.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Once Texas opens more roads and residents have uninterrupted power, health care providers will have to spend “double the time” on Covid-19 vaccinations, Fauci said Thursday.
According to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 3 million of the roughly 29 million Texans have received at least their first dose of Pfizers or Moderna’s two doses of Covid-19 vaccines. And 1.2 million of those people have already gotten their second chance.
Fauci added that he does not know how many vaccine doses could have been destroyed due to power outages or delivery delays.
– CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this report.