The Trump administration is accelerating the launch of a program to offer coronavirus vaccines in retail pharmacies in an effort to speed up the slow rollout of immunizations, officials said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters the original plan was to ramp up the program over time.<\/p>\n
But the administration has come under fire recently over the slow and sloppy rollout of vaccines under Operation Warp Speed. Officials had set a goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of December, but fell far short.<\/p>\n
As of Wednesday, about 5.3 million people have received the first dose of the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.<\/p>\n
Azar said tens of thousands of pharmacies have already enrolled in the program, though only a few thousand will start vaccinating people initially because of supply constraints.<\/p>\n
State efforts:\u00a0<\/em>Azar urged states not to get bogged down in the silos of priority groups, and said it’s better to get shots into arms quickly, even if every single health worker hasn’t been vaccinated yet.<\/p>\n “Right now, there is no reason that states need to complete, say vaccinating all health care providers, before opening up vaccinations to older Americans or other, especially vulnerable populations,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Trump administration is accelerating the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30425,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30424\/revisions\/30425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}