America has ~330 million people. Let's assume the 18.7 Million was just in the month of january..not 100% acurate, but not 100% inaccurate.
That gives us a timeline of more than 1 year at current rate to vaccinate the entire US. Even vaccinating 70% the population will take roughly a year at current pace.
Not only is production still ramping up, but keep in mind the following:
1. As time goes on, more staff is trained and protocols are learned. Bugs are ironed out. Vaccinating people becomes faster overall.
2. All the high-impact vaccinations are done at the beginning. By the end of January, most western countries will be done vaccinating their highest-risk groups. This is the highest impact of all the vaccination phases because the high-risk groups represent the highest amount of hospital cases, so this will greatly reduce load on hospitals, which in turn will reduce transmissions in hospitals and free up healthcare personnel, and so on.
3. More vaccines are still being approved. The Pfizer vaccine is the one that is most in use right now, and it has logistical complexity attached due to its storage requirements. With more vaccines in play, this will become less of an issue making distribution easier outside of cities especially, and speeding up vaccinations overall.
There's good reasons to be positive about the vaccines right now. I do wish my country (Belgium) would focus all its efforts on it, because our current vaccination logistics are pathetic.
Yeah, in Q3 I was really hoping to be on an airplane this summer.
I realized in December or early January that due to the insane mismanagement it's going to ruin this summer too, and it'll likely be Q3 of this year before travel is really safe or reasonable again.
The US already has plenty of centralized health infrastructure (and did before Obama); this comment is a (partisan pot shot) red herring, and completely irrelevant to the vaccine distribution clusterfuck.
The issue is not lack of infrastructure, it's gross incompetence of the regional authorities who are responsible for distributing the vaccine.
If you thought the federal government sucked, wait until you see how bad the states are.
That’s what they said about the human genome project, back when it looked like it was going to take decades because of how slow the progress had been. (They finished ahead of schedule.)
I highly doubt we'll have an exponential curve for manufacturing supply.
Even a 2x increase is incredibly difficult. Just look at n95 manufacturing, a much easier problem to solve. We never saw exponential curve in its manufacturing.
That gives us a timeline of more than 1 year at current rate to vaccinate the entire US. Even vaccinating 70% the population will take roughly a year at current pace.
Puts things in some perspective.