When should healthy and young Americans expect to receive the COVID-19 vaccination? It might not be until the summer.
What happened:
Infectious disease expert Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN Sunday night that younger Americans might have to wait until the summer, possibly end of summer, to get their vaccines.
- “We’re looking at probably middle of the summer, end of the summer before the average, healthy, young American has access to vaccination,” Gounder told CNN.
Gounder — who is a former member of the Biden transition COVID-19 advisory board — said the focus is on preventing new COVID-19 variants from spreading too widely.
- “The best way to prevent the emergence of new variants is to do all of the things we’ve been talking about for months,” she told CNN. “The more you let the virus spread, the more it mutates, the more variants you’ll have.”
How much vaccine is there?
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Gounder’s comments come as the U.S. faces uncertainty about the amount of available COVID-19 vaccine. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, new director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Fox News Sunday” that the federal government doesn’t know how much vaccine there is right now.
- “I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have, and if I can’t tell it to you then I can’t tell it to the governors and I can’t tell it to the state health officials,” she said.
- “If they don’t know how much vaccine they’re getting not just this week but next week and the week after they can’t plan. They can’t figure out how many sites to roll out, they can’t figure out how many vaccinators that they need, and they can’t figure out how many appointments to make for the public,” Walensky said.