Washington, DC – Over the past 10 months of despair and hardship wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the prospect of an effective vaccine was always seen as the light at the end of the tunnel.
That hope appeared to materialise last month when US health authorities approved two vaccines for emergency use across the country.
But weeks after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, public health experts say immunisation efforts have been glacially slow and haphazard.
“The roll-out of the vaccine has been slower than expected, but it’s also frankly been chaotic,” said Kevin Schulman, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California.
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Donis Hernández spent three hours Wednesday trying to register his 77-year-old father for a COVID-19 vaccination appointment.
The Las Vegas construction worker and his dad have been waiting for this moment. Hernández works at construction sites where four of his co-workers have contracted COVID-19. He worries about his dad, who lives with him.
But when he finally got through on the newly opened online portal for seniors, appointments already were booked through June.