Top infectious disease doctor waits on shot despite being “ready to go.”
Federal and state officials have yet to allocate a single shipment of Covid-19 vaccine to the National Institutes for Health, despite the agency — and its leading infectious disease researcher Anthony Fauci — playing a central role in developing one of those shots, according to two officials and internal emails reviewed by POLITICO.
The agency is “hopeful” that its frontline staff around the country will soon get access to vaccines, NIH Director Francis Collins wrote in an email to staff on Friday. “For other NIH staff, vaccinations will not be possible until 2021, and it is not yet clear how vaccines will be provided — whether through NIH or through community sites.”
NIH researchers including Fauci helped develop a vaccine with the biotech company Moderna that’s expected to win authorization from the Food and Drug Administration on Friday. Fauci and other NIH officials also advised on the Operation Warp Speed initiative to rush vaccines, including the Pfizer vaccine that the FDA authorized last Friday and was distributed nationally this week.
NIH, which is headquartered in Bethesda, Md., and has about 20,000 staff, also boasts a research hospital, the NIH Clinical Center, where doctors are seeing Covid-19 patients in addition to conducting daily screening and tests of the agency’s staff. “We still do not know the date or time that vaccine will arrive and we also do not yet know how much vaccine we will receive,” Jim Gilman, the CEO of the clinical center, wrote to staff on Wednesday.
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Officials have yet to allocate a single shipment of Covid-19 vaccine to the National Institutes for Health, despite the agency's role in developing one of those shotshttps://t.co/PRnVa4h0Ft
— POLITICO (@politico) December 18, 2020
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