With only nine days to go, it's unlikely the U.S. will meet the original goal of having 20 million people vaccinated by the end of the year, members of Operation Warp Speed said Wednesday.
"That objective is unlikely to be met," Moncef Slaoui, chief science adviser for Operation Warp Speed, said during a media briefing Wednesday. "The process of immunizations — shots in arms — is happening slower than we thought it would be."
What Slaoui's team can commit to is the number of doses to be distributed. "We're getting the vaccines out as fast as they are available," Army Gen. Gustave Perna, the chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, said during the briefing.
As of Wednesday morning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 1 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in the past two weeks.
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The data only account for shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine given so far, and likely lag by several days, as numbers from hundreds of health care and long-term care facilities continue to be reported to the agency.
