US Surgeon General Jerome Adams this morning defended the Trump administration's failure to deliver on its goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020.
Adams told CNN's Jake Tapper that the federal government did deliver 20 million doses to the states as promised.
"I want people to understand that the projections we were putting out were based on what we could control at the federal level. And we did deliver on 20 million doses delivered, but you're always going to have more doses allocated versus delivered. Delivered versus shots in arms. I just want to be frank," he said.
On what went wrong, Adams said that because of the surge of cases over the past month "the local capacity to be able to vaccinate was being used for testing and responding to surges."
"We have to understand that it occurred over the holidays and people in health departments and in hospitals take holiday breaks too," he added.
Adams said that there is "good news" to report as vaccinations ramp up.
"The last 72 hours, we saw 1.5 million first shots reported. If you extrapolate that out and many people are extrapolating numbers, that is 500,000 a day," he said.
The US Surgeon General said he wanted the American people to "have hope" that the vaccines are "being delivered are translated more and more into shots."
Some more context: The CDC says the US has administered more than 4 million vaccine doses, but is lagging behind some other countries as the number of cases continue to surge.