United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is taking up efforts to track coronavirus mutation infection and keep vaccines and treatments effective against new variants at least till collective immunity is reached, the agency’s chief said on Sunday. Dr. Rochelle Walensky spoke about the rapidly evolving virus during an interview on Sunday as the number of Americans known to be infected with deadly virus surpassed 25 million, fatality crossed 417,000, just over a year after the first U.S. case was officially documented.

Walensky, the new CDC director who took charge on the day President Joe Biden was sworn in, also said the greatest immediate culprit for sluggish vaccine distribution was a supply crunch worsened by inventory confusion inherited from the Trump administration. “The fact that we don’t know today, five days into this administration, and weeks into planning, how much vaccine we have just gives you a sense of the challenges we’ve been left with,” she told in the interview. 

“We are now scaling up both our surveillance of the new variants and our study of these,” Walensky said, adding that the CDC was collaborating with the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and even the Pentagon. The Objective of this was to monitor “the impact of these variants on vaccines, as well as on our therapeutics,” as the virus continues to mutate while it spreads. She added, "Until vaccines can provide “herd” immunity in the population, mask-wearing and social distancing remain vital to “decrease the amount of virus that is circulating, and therefore, decrease the amount of variants". 

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