After three months of vaccination across the U.S., a majority of American adults have gotten shots, and the effort will soon shift from mass inoculation to mop-up.
As of Saturday, 138.6 million people in the U.S. have received at least one Covid-19 vaccine shot. About 1.3 million more are getting a first dose every day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the rate of new vaccinators is declining, even if it were immediately cut in half, it would mean that six weeks from now more than half of the population of the U.S. and its territories will have had a dose.
Almost all of those who get a first dose are likely to get their second, according to one CDC study. On top of that, more than 80% of people age 60 or over—the most vulnerable group—have had a dose and will likewise complete vaccination.
That may be sufficient, at least to see a significant impact on U.S. caseloads. The U.S. is currently about where Israel’s vaccine campaign was in mid-February, three weeks before cases there began to plunge. (Israel has, in total, vaccinated just under 60% of its population.)
But in the next few weeks, what the vaccine campaign is going to look like is going to change dramatically. The Biden administration is pursuing a strategy of abundance, which the White House has referred to as an “overwhelm the problem” approach. That means that there will likely still be widespread shipping of vaccines to pharmacies and health centers, inoculation clinics and mobile vaccine resources.
But what’s likely to disappear are lines and scarcity.
“It’s OK if there’s not a long line of 1,000 people,” Natalie Quillian, the White House’s deputy coordinator of its Covid-19 response, told Bloomberg this week. “That’s good, that was the plan.”
There are many signs that’s already happening. In New York City, which had some of the tightest vaccine availability at the start of the rollout, the health department announced Friday that appointments were no longer needed at city sites and people could walk in for shots.
All of this points to a U.S. mass vaccine campaign that’s closer to the end than the beginning.
For more than three months now, the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker has published a daily figure of how many doses were reported administered in the U.S. After months of mostly going up, that figure is now starting to decline. The goal of a vaccine campaign is to run out of people to vaccinate. That’s where the country is now headed.
That doesn’t mean an end to the vaccine efforts; it just means that they look different. Jeff Zients, the White House’s Covid response coordinator, said on Friday that the vaccine campaign is entering its “next phase.”
Lower Totals
“Going forward, we expect daily vaccination rates will moderate and fluctuate,” he said at a briefing in Washington. “We’ve gotten vaccinations to the most at-risk and those most eager to get vaccinated as quickly as possible. And we will continue those efforts, but we know reaching other populations will take time and focus.”
It also means that how the vaccine rollout has been measured so far will be different. There will likely be no more 4-million-dose days. On Saturday, the U.S. tallied 3 million doses administered, the lowest Saturday total since March 20. Success will mean chipping away at the increasingly small group of people who haven’t gotten a shot yet. If that effort is working, the daily vaccine rates should continue to fall as health workers run out of people who need to be vaccinated.