GRI Founding Director, Stephen Flynn, recently spoke with Fast Company to discuss the COVID-19 roll outs. “What we’re dealing with is the capacity for the state and the municipalities to essentially mobilize themselves to be able to carry out this campaign, and they’re doing that without a lot of resources,” Dr. Flynn says.

In collaboration with Bouvé College of Health Sciences, GRI recently released a module, COVID-19: Vaccines 101, aimed to help individuals and communities make informed decisions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Read more about this here.

 

Excerpt:

As COVID-19 cases in the U.S. continue to surge—with 2,000 to 3,000 Americans dying every day and the situation in Los Angeles so dire that ambulance drivers are being told to leave patients with little chance of survival at home to save space at overwhelmed hospitals—millions of doses of vaccines are still sitting on shelves.

As of January 4, more than 15 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been distributed to the states. That’s far fewer than the government had promised: In October, both President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that there would be 100 million doses available by the end of 2020. In November, Azar revised that down to 40 million doses, enough to inoculate 20 million people. By December, the government said that it would keep half of the doses in reserve. Of the doses that did end up going to states, only 4.5 million have been administered so far. At the current pace, it would take nearly a decade to inoculate 80% of the population, the number that some experts say is needed to reach herd immunity.

Read the full article here.