Not only has Governor Whitmer made several appeals to the government to send additional vaccines, but she also appealed directly to President Joe Biden last week in a call that lasted over 20 minutes.
However, there seems to be a standoff between the governor and the Biden administration. Biden’s top health advisers made clear Monday, that more vaccines won’t help in this case as one warned they aren’t going to play “whack-a-mole” with vaccines, according to CNN.
“We have to remember the fact that in the next two to six weeks, the variants that we’ve seen in Michigan, those variants are also present in other states. So our ability to vaccinate people quickly in each of those states, rather than taking vaccines and shifting it to playing whack-a-mole, isn’t the strategy that public health leaders and scientists have laid out,” said Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the President on coronavirus.
“The answer is not necessarily to give the vaccine,” said CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, reports the New York Times “The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and to shut things down.”
Walwnsky explained that the delay from when vaccines are administered to when they become effective would make it impractical. There is a two-week period between the second dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine and the one shot of the Johnson&Johnson vaccine before people are considered fully vaccinated.
Michigan is experiencing one of the worst surges in cases of the B.1.1.7 variant of Covid-19. Not only is this variant driving the high number of cases in the state, but loosened restrictions, travel, youth sporting events, and uneven compliance with mandated rules has not helped.
Governor Whitmer is sitting right between a rock and a hard place because she was stripped of her authority by the Michigan Supreme Court last October to issue new or renew executive orders related to the COVID-19 crisis in the state beyond April 30, 2020.
Michigan still has a mask mandate in place and restrictions on indoor dining, where capacity is limited to 50m percent. A state official told CNN on Monday that the restrictions follow current CDC guidelines and touted them as some of the toughest in the Midwest.
