The J&J pause really threw a monkey-wrench into all of this, and it is impossible to tell how the pause affected the peak vaccination rate beyond simply establishing the date of the peak. The US's peak vaccination rate over a week was 3.22 million/day, in the week ending April 13, the day before the pause. At that time, the J&J vaccine accounted for 460,000 per day.
We're now running out of people to vaccinate, but it is tough to tell how much the J&J pause affected the timing of it. The pause took about 3 days to become effective, but even at that, the rate of vaccinations has dropped smoothly since then, to about 2 million/day as of 5/6. President Biden's directive was for "everyone else" to be made eligible by April 19. Assuming a backlog of "everyone else's" of about a week, one might have expected the rate to peak around April 26, about two weeks later than it actually did.
Even after being reinstated, J&J vaccinations are only back up to about 80,000 /day (though still slowly rising), so the pause totally destroyed the J&J vaccination effort. And reinstating it hasn't turned the total vaccinations/day needle back positive. Using myself as an example of the impact on the rates/timing, the pause caused me to re-schedule and change from J&J to Pfizer, delaying my first dose by 5 days and full vaccination by 3.5 weeks.
Overall, first doses peaked at 1.66 M/day on April 1st and were down to about 700,000 a week ago. Second doses peaked at 1.46 M/day on April 22 and are down to 1.25 M/day. 118M fully vaccinated is 45% of those aged 16+. That's not good enough. I don't expect the rates to continue their rapid decay, as up until a few weeks ago people have been pushing to be vaccinated. Even two days ago I drove 30 miles for my second dose and waited in line an hour for it. I think we'll soon settle into a somewhat steady rate of people being pulled to be vaccinated. But it might only be half a million 1st doses a day. There are 70 million "delivered" doses in the distribution pipeline and we will be hard-pressed to use them even if we stopped new shipments tomorrow.
My local news has been talking for weeks about how great the recent pandemic progress is and how our infection rates are "plunging". Sure; the infection rate's dropped by a little more than half over the past three weeks. It's still about triple what it was in the late summer lull. Perhaps by the time my vaccine is fully engaged the numbers will be low enough for me to feel comfortable in a restaurant.
