Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
The US has administered 200 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine, a White House official said Friday.
Just under 40% of Americans have had at least one dose, and about a quarter have completed one and two-dose vaccinations. The news was announced on Twitter by Cyrus Shahpar, the Covid-19 Data Director at the White House.
Vaccine rollout is accelerating as supply increases, with the US giving injections to about 1% of the population every day, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. It took the US 89 days to deliver the first 100 million doses, a milestone reached on March 12. The second 100 million has come in just 36 days.
President Joe Biden has said his goal was to deliver 200 million doses in the first 100 days of his administration. Since the vaccination started under the Donald Trump administration, it takes an additional 16.5 million doses to reach Biden’s goal. That should happen next week, about a week before Biden’s deadline.
That goal will be a bit more difficult to achieve due to a break in using Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, as health regulators investigate reports of dangerous blood clots. It is not clear when the use of those recordings will resume. A panel of expert advisers has indicated they need at least another week to study the matter.
The pause in J & J’s vaccines won’t have a major impact anytime soon – the vast majority of doses distributed in the US are shots taken by Pfizer Inc. and his German partner BioNTech SE, and on Moderna Inc. But the single-dose J&J vaccines are important to longer-term delivery to the US, and the fact that they are single-dose makes them easier to use, especially for more difficult-to-reach populations.
There are also signs that even if the government distributes tens of millions of doses per week, supply is starting to build up in certain locations. A handful of states now have more than 30% of the doses left unused, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
Some of that growing surplus may represent an expected inefficiency, as vaccines are being sent to more locations and many of the most enthusiastic people have been injected. But there are also signs in some places, such as Lynchburg, Virginia, that vaccination appointments are not being met, even though a lower-than-average proportion of the local population has been vaccinated.