The Trump administration moved Tuesday to ease policies and recommendations constraining the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, aiming to jolt the lagging program.
The administration, in a reversal, is now recommending that states vaccinate everyone over 65 and those with serious health conditions. It will also send all available doses of the coronavirus vaccines to states rather than holding back millions of shots for second doses.
“We are telling states that they should open vaccines to all people age 65 and over and all people under age 65 with a comorbidity with some form of medical documentation, as defined by governors,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said on a media call Tuesday. “There was never a reason that states needed to complete vaccinating all healthcare providers before opening vaccinations to older Americans and other vulnerable populations.”
He added that states should start using pharmacies, community health centers, and mass vaccination sites to reach more people.
The administration will also be releasing all of the vaccine doses.
“We’re now making the full reserve of doses we have available for order,” Azar said. “We are 100% committed to ensuring a second dose is available for every American who received a first dose.”
Azar said that the federal government could release all the reserve doses because the pace of vaccine production is now consistent. He said that second doses would now be supplied by doses coming off of manufacturing lines.
The administration had previously decided to withhold roughly half of all available doses of the vaccines to ensure that people who received the first shots would have access to the second.
Azar also seemed to lay much of the blame for the slow pace of vaccination with state governments.
“Some states’ heavy-handed micromanagement of this process stood in the way of vaccines reaching a broader swath of the population more quickly,” he said.
President-elect Joe Biden has already announced his administration’s plans to release all available doses at one time in the hopes of immunizing 100 million people within the first 100 days of him taking office.
The policy reversal comes as the average rate of daily new cases hit its highest level so far, with more than 246,000 new cases confirmed each day over the past week. New cases hit an all-time high of more than 310,000 on Jan. 8, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
