Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC’s “This Week” Sunday morning that he sees a “glimmer of hope” in a recent uptick in coronavirus vaccinations.
While Operation Warp Speed has helped deliver two effective, FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccinations so far, distribution and inoculations have not gone as quickly as expected.
Asked about the pace of action by guest-host Martha Raddatz, Fauci pointed to recent developments as a sign that things could be moving in the right direction.
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“There have been a couple of glitches,” Fauci said. “That’s understandable. The important thing, Martha, is to see what’s happening in the next week to week and a half.”
The White House coronavirus task force member acknowledged that initial promises of 20 million distributed doses by the end of 2020 fell short, but said they are “catching up” in January.
“What we need to catch up with now is getting into people’s arms because there’s now about 4 million,” he said. “We wanted to get to 20 million. But some little glimmer of hope is that in the last 72 hours they’ve gotten 1.5 million doses into people’s arms which is an average of about 500,000 a day, which is much better than the beginning when it was much, much less than that.”
“So we are not where we want to be,” Fauci added. “No doubt about that, but I think we can get there if we really accelerate, get some momentum going and see what happens as we get into the first couple weeks of January.” (RELATED: Dr. Paul Offit Calls For ‘Mass Vaccination Events’ To Speed Up Distribution)
At this point, the CDC tracker cites 13 million doses distributed with over 4.2 million receiving the vaccine.