More than 550,000 Americans have received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine as of Sunday night, according to new figures released online by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of vaccinated Americans is encouraging news, as covid-19 continues to devastate the United States, a country that has surpassed 216,000 cases of the disease per day for the past seven days.
The CDC reports that more than 2.8 million doses of the new vaccine have already been distributed, although it is unclear how that word is being defined. It could mean that 2.8 million doses have been delivered to state governments or it could mean that these doses have been directed to the supply chain, for example, to healthcare providers.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is the only inoculation that has been injected into the arms of Americans since Sunday night and requires two doses administered 21 days apart. The FDA on Friday authorized a vaccine produced by Moderna to be used urgently and is currently being shipped to health care providers across the country. The Modern vaccine requires two doses 28 days apart.
It’s great to see that vaccines are finally being injected into Americans, a step on the road to the country’s recovery. But there have been many challenges in such a historic launch. One of the leaders of Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s vaccine distribution and planning group, apologized Saturday for overestimating the number of doses that would reach some states last week. Governors of more than a dozen states, of Michigan and Washington, complained that they were not receiving as many doses as had been promised.
“I failed, no one else failed,” said General Gustave Perna, the top military official in Operation Warp Speed. Saturday according to Stat News.
G / O Media may receive a commission
Perna dismissed rumors that there had been production issues with the Pfizer vaccine and was fully responsible for the calculation errors about how quickly doses could be administered to healthcare providers over the past week.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which requires ultra-cold storage of -70 degrees Celsius, has been shown to be 95% effective and prevents serious illness and death in people receiving both doses. Everyone who received the vaccine in phase 3 clinical trials avoided severe cases of covid-19, a tremendously encouraging sign. The Modern vaccine was 94.1% effective in clinical trials and does not require ultra-cold storage.
The United States has reported more than 17.8 million cases of covid-19 and 317,600 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University, with the number of cases and deaths accelerated over the past week.
The United States has been the country most affected in terms of pure numbers, but other countries are also struggling with the pandemic. The UK, in particular, has seen the virus resurface this winter, almost 36,000 new cases of the virus only on Sunday. More than a dozen countries banned travel from the UK over the weekend, driven not only by a large number of cases, but reported that Britain has seen mutation of covid-19 this has created a more contagious strain of the virus.
The United Kingdom also instituted new ones internal travel restrictions for this week, a reversal of the Conservative government led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had promised more relaxed rules just before Christmas. The United Kingdom was the first Western country to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for emergency use, but only 350,000 people in Britain they have received the first dose of vaccine as of this weekend.
Other countries also implement vaccines, some manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and others manufactured by China and Russia. China’s local health ministry aims to vaccinate 50 million people on February 15, the start of a busy travel season in China with the Lunar New Year. It’s an ambitious plan, but China has previously accomplished other seemingly impossible tasks, such as testing Wuhan’s 11 million residents in just over a week when a new coronavirus outbreak occurs. appeared in May. Wuhan City, the original source of the virus, has had no case of community transmission in months and life has returned to normal.
The vaccine will take time to reach all Americans, to say nothing of everyone in the world. But it is a great relief to see positive news about the coronavirus at once. Approximately 550,000 Americans now have some degree of protection against the worst global health crisis of our lives. And they will have even more protection when they receive the second doses in three weeks.