The White House said Thursday that the Biden administration will dedicate nearly $10 billion to expand access to COVID-19 vaccines for the high risk communities that have been struck hard by the pandemic, while also funneling resources into boosting vaccine confidence across the country.
“Equity is at the center of the Administration’s COVID-19 response,” the White House said in a statement Thursday announcing that the Department of Health and Human Services would dedicate $6 billion from the COVID-19 economic relief law to expand access to COVID-19 vaccines in underserved communities and $3 billion to strengthen vaccine confidence. The funding will be made available in early April.
HHS, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will also provide $300 million for community health worker services to support COVID-19 prevention and control and an additional $32 million for training, technical assistance, and evaluation, the White House said. The funding will be used to address “disparities in access to COVID-19 related services, such as testing, contact tracing, and vaccinations,” the White House said. It is also expected to target factors that increase risk of severe COVID-19 illness such as chronic diseases, pregnancy, and food insecurity.
The administration also announced expanded vaccine eligibility to patients served by community health centers participating in the federal Health Center COVID-19 Vaccine Program, making patients, including front line essential workers, at those centers eligible for vaccines.
The White House also reported that its existing efforts to set up federally-run community vaccination centers in hard-hit areas and to distribute vaccines to local pharmacies and Community Health Centers that disproportionately serve vulnerable populations had yielded results, noting that 60 percent of doses at federally-run Community Vaccination sites were administered to people of color. “These actions are garnering initial results,” the White House said, adding: “But there is more work to do.”
Noting the high incidence of kidney disease among people of color, the White House announced it would launch a new partnership with dialysis clinics to provide COVID-19 vaccinations to people receiving dialysis at clinics and health care workers serving at treatment centers.
The administration announced last week that it had surpassed its goal of administering 100 million coronavirus vaccine doses within Biden’s first 100 days in office.
President Joe Biden has pledged that all adults in the United States will have access for vaccines by May 1, a deadline that was moved up from more conservative estimates that projected widespread access to the shots for all American adults wouldn’t be possible until later in the summer.
The first thing they need to do is stop all the miscommunication. It happens at every level… Our Democratic governor (Wolf) in PA is talking up how well vaccination is going, and about opening up more groups to the vaccine, when it is impossible for some in 1a to get a vaccine in Lehigh county.
I got my first Pfizer at the Microsoft Conference Center across from the Executive Building in Redmond. My microchip is a freshie.
Sadly, it’s what comes of a process that has 53 different ways of going about things. States and possessions were left to their own devices as to how and when to vaccine who. It’s why so many of my friends in the east that were younger and less compromised were fully vaccinated before I could be in Wisconsin (I got my first one yesterday, finally!). Without a unified approach, it was a mess to start with.
Now that Biden has requested States open up to all on 1 May, which we are also doing here in WI, that’s a little more unified than what we’ve had to date.
Second to this is product availability. I got Moderna in WI; my husband got Moderna in MN. But my friends in Texas got J&J. There was also, allegedly (don’t ask me for a cite), where syringes to deliver the doses were in short supply. Those manufacturers are now also in the Defense Production Act program, so that’s getting resolved.
And yes, finally, the BS that the naysayers are putting up there gets far more airplay than the facts. Nothing short of shutting down social media and Faux and the others will stop that.
Maybe that microchip is why we all get sore arms the next day… LOL!!!
Slightly OT, but this XKCD strip has a pretty good–and offbeat, as usual–analogy/explanation for how the mRNA vaccines work.