Top health advisers to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. warned on Tuesday that planning for the distribution of a Covid-19 vaccine and other attempts to fight the coronavirus were being frustrated by President Trump’s refusal to allow an organized transition to begin.
The leaders of Mr. Biden’s Covid Advisory Board said they were being prevented from working with government officials who are in charge of distributing the vaccines. And they said that they did not have access to any government data on case counts, deaths or hospitalization, relying instead on media and private reports.
“There’s no time to waste. We don’t have a day to waste,” said Dr. David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. “Vaccine distribution is difficult and daunting under any circumstance.”
The grim warnings from the health officials come as a political appointee of Mr. Trump’s at the General Services Administration has refused to formally recognize that Mr. Biden is the winner, a move that would allow current government health officials to work with the Biden transition team.
Mr. Biden on Monday said that “more people may die” from the virus as a result.
His health advisers offered more specifics on Tuesday, saying that the incoming team needs access to information about medical supply chains, data on testing, specifics about therapeutic efforts, and other data that will be critical once the Biden administration is in charge of responding to the pandemic.
“There is valuable information inside the information that is held by career officials,” said Vivek Murthy, a co-chair of Mr. Biden’s advisory board and a former surgeon general. “We need to talk to those individuals. We need to work together with them.”
