Pentagon approves deployment of 1,000 active duty troops to assist in Covid vaccine distribution

The Pentagon has approved deploying more than 1,000 active duty troops to assist in distributing the Covid-19 vaccine across the country, the Biden administration announced on Friday.

Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin approved the request made by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), White House senior adviser Andy Slavitt said during a Covid-19 briefing.

A portion of the approved troops will arrive in California as early as next week, Mr Slavitt said, to start operations in that area by 15 February. There will be "additional vaccination missions soon to follow," he added.

The military will play a "crucial" role in mass vaccination sites that will be created by FEMA across the country to "ensure that every American who wants a vaccine will receive one," according to the White House adviser.

Mr Slavitt said that the Pentagon would supply more information about this deployment in a press briefing Friday afternoon.

In total, FEMA has requested 10,000 active duty personnel to assist as the federal agency works to create 100 vaccine sites across the country in the next month. That request was still under discussion with the Pentagon.

These vaccination sites will be run in partnership with the federal government and states to help administer the Covid-19 jabs at a higher rate.

Two of the first vaccination sites to open will be in California, a state that's struggled to swiftly vaccinate its residents compared to others. These vaccination sites at Oakland-Alameda Coliseum and California State University, Los Angeles, will be jointly run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services.

Expectation will be for these sites to be open on 16 February to administer vaccines to eligible residents, who will have to sign up for an appointment through an online portal. Each site will administer up to 5,000 doses a day, said state emergency services spokesman Brian Ferguson.

Governor Gavin Newsom said this week that these locations were prioritised in an effort to help underserved communities in the state.

"The reason this site was chosen was the framework of making sure that communities that are often left behind are not left behind – they're prioritised in terms of the administration of these vaccines," Mr Newsom said during a news conference this week.

President Joe Biden made the promise to administer at least 100 million vaccine doses within his first 100 days of office. The country was now administering about 1.3 million doses per day, but officials have indicated that could increase to 1.5 million or 2 million per day.

Opening up vaccination sites across the country with the assistance of active troops was one way the Biden administration intended to increase vaccine administration in the coming months.

The goal was for the military to ramp up vaccine administration by about 450,000 doses per day.

More than 57 million vaccine doses have been distributed to states and 35 million of those doses have been administered as of 4 February, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracker.