Warning that vaccines are the only backstop the country has against fast-spreading new variants of the coronavirus, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday that federal and state leaders need to “hit the reset and adopt a new strategy” to get far more shots into arms as soon as possible. Speaking on “Face the Nation” on CBS News, Dr. Gottlieb said the 40 million doses currently available could go a long way toward protecting the nation’s 50 million residents who are 65 and older in particular. “I think we need to take an all-of-the-above approach and push it out through different channels,” Dr. Gottlieb said, “including the big-box stores, including federal sites that the Biden administration is talking about standing up. We need to try everything right now to create multiple distribution points.”According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22.1 million doses had been sent to states as of Friday but only about 6.7 million people had received the first of two necessary doses. That data lags the most recent allocations by at least a few days.

Source: New York Times January 10, 2021 22:30 UTC