That amount could increase vaccination against Covid-19 for states by 25 percent and be delivered in a day or two in the first week, said the chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. Lori Tremmel Freeman.
Vaccine administration has already increased, with 2.2 million more vaccines on Friday than the previous day and about 70.5 million doses given in total, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But with the spread of variants and the threat to send the decline in new cases once again, officials hope to anticipate the spread with faster inoculations.
“We’ve had two vaccines and now it looks like we’ll have three and that means we can get more doses in our arms and we can try to get this terrible pandemic,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told Wolf Blitzer from CNN.
New cases of coronavirus have begun to rise after a steady decline, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that they could be the “initial effects” of the most transmissible variants. would have an impact.
“The CDC has been sounding the alarm about the continued spread of variants in the United States,” he said during a White House briefing on Friday.
Misconceptions that Johnson & Johnson vaccine is “second class”
The 22 members of the FDA Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Organic Products voted unanimously to recommend the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which one member said was an “easy call.”
“Clearly it goes over the bar and it’s good to have a single-dose vaccine,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
But some officials are concerned that citizens misunderstand the good quality of the vaccine and see it as a “second class,” a misconception that public health leaders will have to deal with.
“It is difficult to make an apple-to-apple comparison between authorized vaccines, based on data collected before it was believed that the new variants were in widespread circulation,” said Sarah Christopherson, director of policy advocacy for the United States. National Health Health Network
While it may appear that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine has a lower efficacy rate than its previous counterparts, that doesn’t make it a worse option because it looks like the latest protection against some of the virus variants, he said. another committee member who recommended the vaccine.
“A dose will keep you out of the hospital, keep you out of the intensive care unit, and keep you out of the morgue,” Dr. Paul Offit told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Several public health experts told Congress Friday that people who had the Johnson & Johnson vaccine available should receive it.
“If I had a J&J vaccine available today and a Modern vaccine available tomorrow, I would be happy to take the J&J vaccine today. I don’t think I have to wait. They are all fantastic vaccines for the things that interest us,” said Dr. Ashish Jha , dean of Brown University School of Public Health, at a House Ways and Means Health subcommittee hearing.
This is not the time to change doses
Promising news about the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine has also come out.
Only one dose can induce a strong enough immune response in people who have already had Covid-19 that could protect them from future infections, according to two new articles published in The Lancet on Thursday.
The vaccine is currently given in two doses, separated by 21 days. The first dose prepares the immune system and the second strengthens it to protect it against Covid-19.
Some officials have suggested prioritizing the administration of first doses, to increase the immune response in as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
But with the emerging variants, now is not the time to change the two-dose program for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Vaccination and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, in conversation with the Journal of the American Medical Association Friday.
“Vaccines have been studied and approved, authorized, recommended as a dose program. Our programs are based on that. We have communicated it to the public,” he said. “I just don’t think there’s enough science to tell us it’s time to change what we know is an effective regime.”
CNN’s Jacqueline Howard, Deidre McPhillips, Lauren Mascarenhas, Nicholas Neville, Maggie Fox, Jen Christensen, Jamie Gumbrecht and Virginia Langmaid contributed to this report.