Trump Officials Push Ambitious Vaccine Timeline as California Locks Down

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s top health officials outlined an ambitious timetable on Sunday for distributing the first coronavirus vaccinations to as many as 24 million people by mid-January, even as the accelerating toll of the pandemic filled more hospital beds across the United States and prompted new shutdown orders in much of California.

After criticism from President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. that the administration had “no detailed” vaccine distribution plan, Moncef Slaoui, the chief science adviser of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s vaccine development program, said all residents of long-term care facilities and health workers could receive the first round of vaccinations by mid-January.

A vaccine manufactured by Pfizer could be available by the end of the week, after anticipated approval by the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Slaoui said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, was just as optimistic.

“Really within days,” Mr. Azar said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Within 24 hours of F.D.A. green lighting with authorization, we’ll ship to all of the states and territories that we work with. And within hours, they can be vaccinating.”

But the hopeful comments were met with some skepticism as they played out against an increasingly desperate backdrop, with the virus surging across the country and packing hospitals to near capacity with critically ill patients. On Friday, more than 229,000 new cases were reported in the United States, a record, and several states hit new daily highs over the weekend. More than 101,000 Covid-19 patients are in hospitals now, double the number from just a month ago.

Health experts said the timeline sketched out by Dr. Slaoui and Mr. Azar was uncompromising and did not account for the possibility of delay during the many steps from vaccine manufacture to distribution at state and local levels, not to mention the hesitancy that many people might feel about taking a newly approved vaccine. ...