ST. PETERSBURG, Fla — President-elect Joe Biden’s goal of 100 million vaccinations in just 100 days is a lofty one, and doctors say the success of the plan is in the details.
"The broad strokes are great. Let's see how the details really work out,” said Dr. Michael Teng, a virologist at the University of South Florida.
Particularly, doctors are concerned with how well the plan will work out in Florida, where rollout has been rocky. Biden's wish list is long. He wants mass vaccination sites and more medical workers doling out doses, but state and local governments may bear the burden of figuring out details.
"Where do you have it in the community? What kind of buildings, do you use?" Dr. Teng said
The plan also calls for using pharmacies as vaccination sites.
"Those places are not really designed to handle lots of traffic," Dr. Teng explained. "That's not a great recipe for a vaccination center unless they do it in the parking lot or somehow figure out a different way of doing it."
Additionally, the call for mobile units could present challenges for vaccines that require ultra-cold storage. But overall, just having a cohesive plan to start with gives doctors more confidence we can distribute vaccines equitably and efficiently.
"They've actually constructed a whole puzzle, what we had before was just a bunch of pieces in a box that didn't really talk to each other,” Teng said.
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