US Could Have Enough COVID-19 Vaccine Doses by March 2021

Alex Azar, the Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, acknowledged that the United States could have enough COVID-19 vaccine doses for every citizen as early as March 2021.

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The U.S. government's coronavirus vaccine program Operation Warp Speed expects to have up to 100 million doses by the end of the year, Azar said during a keynote speech at the Goldman Sachs Healthcare virtual event on the coronavirus.

He recalled that his country is currently manufacturing doses for all six potential vaccines backed by the U.S. government across over 23 manufacturing facilities.

Several vaccines of the United States are in late-stage trials including from Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson. The country is also obtaining the needles, syringes, bottles, and other supplies needed for immunizations, according to the HHS secretary.

Azar’s announcement comes as President Donald Trump's failure to handle the pandemic has become impossible to conceal. As of Friday morning, the United States had reported 7,838,537 COVID-19 cases and 217,817 deaths.

On September 18, however, the Republican president promised that his country was about to begin the distribution of a locally produced coronavirus vaccine.

"We're very close to that vaccine as you know, and I think closer than most people want to say… we can start sometime in October," he said.

Notwithstanding these claims, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield told U.S. senators that it will be the late second quarter or third quarter of 2021 before a COVID-19 vaccine is available to the public.