“The best way to prevent the emergence of new variants is to do all the things we’ve been talking about for months,” Dr. Celine Gounder, infectious disease expert, told CNN Sunday night. “The more you let the virus spread, the more it mutates, the more variants you will have.”
“I would say one of the biggest problems at the moment is that I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have,” Walensky told Fox News. “If I can’t tell you, then I can’t tell the governors or the state health officials.”
“If they don’t know how much vaccine they’ll get, not just this week but next week and the week after, they can’t plan.”
It will likely be months before the vaccine is widely available to the American public, said Gounder, who is also a former member of the Biden transition Covid-19 advisory board.
“We’re probably looking into the middle of summer, the end of summer, before the average, healthy, young American has access to vaccination,” Gounder told CNN on Sunday.
The US should increase its vaccination target, expert says
“We now go into arms on average nearly a million doses a day, and that’s a pretty good trajectory to get where President Biden wants to get,” said Dr. Francis Collins Saturday at MSNBC.
“We have to do better than a million shots a day,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine at George Washington University Sunday at CNN.
Most injections currently being administered are first doses, Reiner explained.
“ But as we move on, every day more and more injections will be the second vaccination, so the number of new vaccinations will start to decline until we reach a point in the not-too-distant future where every day is the injections that are being given. 50% follow-up and 50% new vaccinations. “
“We have to do better. We have to vaccinate about two million people a day. That should be the goal,” Reiner added.
Agencies that scale up supervision of variant
Meanwhile, Walensky also said on Sunday that the CDC and other agencies are scaling up both surveillance and studies of the new variants so that “we can track these variants,” as well as the impact they may have on vaccines.
“We now have to assume that what is dominantly circulating in the UK has some degree of increase in what we call virulence, which is the virus’s power to do more damage, including death,” Fauci told CBS on Sunday. .
That variant has not been discovered in the US so far, but “we need to expand our genomic surveillance enormously,” Fauci said.
“We know it wasn’t at the level we would have liked, but there is a lot of movement at the CDC level right now, including some input from the NIH and other organizations, to dramatically increase what we call genomic surveillance.”
“We must be ready” for more virus changes
For many experts, the variants are worrying but not surprising.
The bigger lesson we can learn is that the virus will keep changing – and the US must be ready for that, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Biden’s nominee for the US Surgeon General, on ABC Sunday.
“We are in a race against these variants, the viruses are exchanging and it is up to us to adapt and make sure we stay ahead,” he said.
Murthy said this means there must be much better surveillance so that variants can be identified when they occur, public health measures must be doubled, and more investment must be made in treatment strategies.
“This mainly means that we need to invest a lot more in testing and contact tracking, because they will be essential too,” added Murthy.
CNN’s Naomi Thomas and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report.