WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) – After the slow start of the vaccination campaign against the coronavirus in the USA, the nominated Minister of Health Xavier Becerra has promised the individual states more support from Washington. “You can’t just tell the states: Here is the vaccine, here are the masks, now let’s get started,” Becerra said on CNN on Sunday.
The government of the new President Joe Biden sees a key problem in that under his predecessor Donald Trump the central authorities would have taken care of distributing the vaccines in the country – but left the rest to the states.
In response to repeated inquiries, Becerra left it open when every American would have the opportunity to get a corona vaccination. That depends, among other things, on the coordination between local and central authorities – and he does not want to give a date until it has been reliably set. “The plane is nosing – and we have to yank it up. It won’t happen overnight,” Becerra said.
The Trump administration had announced that the vaccines would be available to everyone in the summer. But there are now doubts about that. So far, only around 20 million Americans have been vaccinated, and only a good three million of them have already received both vaccine doses. In some states less than half of the vaccine doses delivered there were used.
Biden speaks of having 100 million vaccine doses administered in the first 100 days of his tenure. The number has been criticized in part for not being ambitious enough after the Trump administration promised a faster pace. Corona expert Anthony Fauci also emphasized on Sunday that this was a minimum target that could be exceeded. “That’s the floor, not the ceiling,” said Fauci on CBS TV.
Fauci recently predicted that there could be a certain return to normalcy in the USA in the fall, provided that a large part of the population can be vaccinated by then./so/DP/edh