US picks up vaccination pace, averaging 2M doses per day

The United States is administering an average of 2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines per day, according to an analysis from The New York Times.

The average is up from one month ago, when the daily average was about 1.3 million doses, according to the Times.

The increased pace means that the Biden administration is on track to reach its goal of administering 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses within the first 100 days of President Biden’s time in office a month ahead of schedule, Axios notes.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 54 million people have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, while 27 million have received two doses.

A total of 82,572,848 doses have been administered thus far, according to the CDC’s data. Forty-two million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and 40 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine have been administered.

The increased pace comes as the Biden administration made concerted efforts to boost vaccinations amid initial logistical hurdles.

Biden said Tuesday that the U.S. will have enough vaccine supply to vaccinate all American adults by the end of May, which was also a shortened time frame from his initial estimation of July.

The president also announced a partnership under which Merck would help manufacture Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose coronavirus vaccine, which the Food and Drug Administration authorized Saturday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has set up several mass vaccination sites in California, Texas and New York, with more slated to be opened soon.

The pace comes as the U.S. logs 28,759,980 coronavirus infections since the pandemic began a year ago, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 518,000 have died.