On CNN Wednesday night, Dr. Jonathan Reiner and Dr. Ashish Jha called out issues with the vaccine rollout thus far, as some administration officials have acknowledged that the number of people vaccinated is lower than they predicted it would be by the end of 2020.

CNN’s Bianna Golodryga — filling in for Erin Burnett — asked if there’s “enough urgency right now to fix this.”

Reiner, a former Bush White House medical adviser and CNN medical analyst, said it reminds him of problems earlier in the year over testing. He said, “There needs to be a fierce urgency to vaccinate the most vulnerable people in this country. And I just don’t see it… We need to give, with these two-dose vaccines, 500 million vaccines and we need to do it quickly. We need mass vaccination events. We need to use the parking lots of baseball stadiums. We need drive-through events. We need arenas. We need to take the vaccine into the community. Telling people just to go to your nearest store isn’t going to get us where we need to be.”

Jha agreed and said, “The biggest difference between us and the other countries is what Dr. Reiner said, basically a sense of urgency to do this. In other countries, they’re not spending their time fighting about whether it’s the states’ responsibility or not. They’re not passing the buck. Much of the administration has spent much of today and yesterday saying that the problem is that we have 50 states failing at their job. That’s one theory. My theory is we have a federal government that’s not providing adequate support. It’s not 50 failed governors. It’s really a failed federal leadership that’s really not doing what needs to be done.”

Golodryga asked if President-elect Joe Biden’s push for vaccinating 100 million people in his first 100 days is too optimistic.

“I don’t think it’s optimistic enough,” Reiner said. “100 people in 100 days is a million people a day. I think we need to do twice that number a day. A million people a day only gets us to what we think is herd immunity in 18 months. That’s a lot of people dying between now and then. If you want to vaccinate 80 percent of the population in the next 10 to 12 months, we need to vaccinate 2 million people a day. And to do that, we need out-of-the-box thinking. We need to learn how to do this quickly, in large numbers, not just by people strolling into their local CVS. We need big events. We need to go into the communities.”

You can watch above, via CNN.

The post CNN Medical Analyst Calls Out Lack of 'Fierce Urgency' in Vaccine Administration: 'We Need Mass Vaccination Events' first appeared on Mediaite.

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