Damien, a teacher in the area around Washington, D.C., has just completed his series of COVID-19 vaccinations.
“I got it, but my daughter didn’t,” Damien, who declined to give his full name, told Xinhua, noting the somewhat haphazard way in which the vaccine distribution has taken place.
As a teacher, Damien gets to go to the front of the line, but his daughter, who has chronic respiratory disease and is thus at high risk, will have to wait.
The vaccine distribution in the United States has been criticized for getting off to a slow start.
But as the kinks get worked out and President Joe Biden makes tweaks here and there, the White House predicts that soon over a million Americans will get the vaccine per day – on target to meet the administration’s goal of 100 million vaccinations in 100 days.
Biden is enlisting the U.S. military in selected locations, and some states are setting up mass vaccination sites.
Last Friday saw the Pentagon deploy over 1,000 troops in a bid to provide vaccination sites with support, the White House announced, as the administration continues to push hard to get the vaccination out nationwide.
This occurs as new U.S. infections have decreased 17 percent in the past week, although the daily death toll is still high.
The country has recorded over 27 million cases with over 465,000 related deaths as of Tuesday morning, according to the real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
As of Monday morning, around 42 million of 59 million distributed doses of the vaccine have found their way into people’s arms since it was approved, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the D.C. area, the office of the governor of the U.S. state of Maryland confirmed to U.S. media that Six Flags, a giant amusement park, will be used as a vaccination mega site.
The site opened on Friday, and is expected to increase to 6,000 appointments per day, acting state health secretary Dennis Schrader told U.S. media.
In the same state, just an hour from Washington, D.C., the Baltimore Convention Center Field hospital was launched as a mass site of vaccinations on Friday.
Recent days have also seen vaccination mega sites open in New York’s Yankee Stadium, as well as at a Casino in the state of Missouri.
Additional sites are being set up, including Levi’s Stadium in the state of California, which will be the nation’s largest when it opens its doors next week, according to the San Francisco 49ers sports team. The site aims for 15,000 daily vaccinations.
National Football League Commissioner Rodger Goodell said the league is making available all 32 of its sports stadiums, for use as public vaccination mega sites.
An additional coronavirus vaccine is reportedly en route. U.S. drug giant Johnson & Johnson filed last week for emergency authorization of its new vaccine. The firm said it predicts it will be able to produce 100 million doses by June.
Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua that the race to inoculate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of Biden’s first term will be a major test of his administration.
The new commander-in-chief will be judged according to his ability to meet that goal, West said.
Clay Ramsay, a senior research associate at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, told Xinhua that the former administration had put together “elements” of a plan, but there was no coordination from the top.
Washington’s push to get everyone inoculated comes as the virus has mutated into new strands.
Researchers predicted that within a month, the coronavirus variant first detected in the UK could become predominant in the United States, potentially bringing a surge of new cases and increased risk of death.
Photo taken on Jan. 31, 2021 shows a COVID-19 vaccination site in San Francisco, California, the United States.(Photo: Xinhua)
