Crédito: fuente
«The best way to prevent the emergence of new variants is to do all of the things we’ve been talking about for months,» infectious disease expert Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN Sunday night. «The more you let the virus spread, the more it mutates, the more variants you’ll have.»
«I would say one of the biggest problems right now is I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have,» Walensky told Fox News. «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.»
«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.»
It likely will be months from now until the vaccine is widely available to the American public, Gounder, who is also a former member of the Biden transition Covid-19 advisory board, said.
«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 Sunday.
US should boost its vaccination goal, expert says
«We are now averaging almost a million doses per day going into arms, and that’s a pretty good trajectory to get to where President Biden wants to,» Dr. Francis Collins told MSNBC Saturday.
«We need to do better than a million shots per day,» Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine at George Washington University told CNN Sunday.
Most of the shots being administered currently are first doses, Reiner explained.
«But as we go forward, more and more shots every day will be the second vaccination so the number of new vaccinations is going to start to drop until we get to a point in the not too distant future where every day the shots that are given are 50% follow-up and 50% new vaccinations.»
«We need to do better. We need to vaccinate about two million people a day. That should be the goal,» Reiner added.
Agencies scaling up surveillance of variant
Meanwhile, Walensky also said Sunday the CDC and other agencies were scaling up both surveillance and studies of the new variants so that «we can monitor these variants as well as monitor» the impact they may have on vaccines.
«We need to assume now that what has been circulating dominantly in the UK does have a certain degree of increase in what we call virulence, namely the power of the virus to cause more damage including death,» Fauci told CBS Sunday.
That variant has so far not been detected in the US, but «we need to expand greatly our genomic surveillance,» Fauci said.
«We know that it had not been at the level that we would have liked, but there’s a lot of movement right now at the CDC level, including some input from the NIH and other organizations, to dramatically increase the what we call genomic surveillance.»
‘We’ve got to be ready’ for more virus changes
For many experts, the variants are concerning but not surprising.
The larger lesson to be learned is that the virus is going to continue changing — and the US needs to be ready for that, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Biden’s nominee for US Surgeon General, told ABC Sunday.
«We’re in a race against these variants, the viruses interchange and it’s up to us to adapt and to make sure that we’re staying ahead,» he said.
Murthy said this means there must be much better surveillance so that variants can be identified when they arise, that public health measures must be doubled down on and that there should be greater investment in treatment strategies.
«Above all, this means we’ve got to invest a lot more in testing and in contact tracing, because there also are going to be essential,» Murthy added.
CNN’s Naomi Thomas and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report.
