The first shipments of the second COVID-19 vaccine authorized in the US came out of a distribution center on Sunday, a boost that was desperately needed as the nation worked to control the coronavirus pandemic.
The trucks left the Olive Branch, Mississippi, near Memphis, Tennessee, with the vaccine developed by Moderna Inc. MRNA,
and the National Institutes of Health. The much-needed shootings are expected to take place starting Monday, just three days after the Food and Drug Administration authorized its emergency release.
In Louisville, Kentucky, UPS driver Todd Elble said his vaccine shipment was the “heaviest cargo I’ve ever carried” in a 37-year career. Her parents contracted COVID-19 in November and her 78-year-old father died. He said the family speculates that his father became infected while traveling on a hunting trip with four other relatives in Wyoming, and some are still ill.
“I’m going to get the vaccine myself. I will be the first in my father’s line (I’ll tell you so much) and anyone else I have to follow, ”he said. “I feel in my heart that everyone should do it, to help stop it.”
He added, “To get this back, I think Dad was in the truck with me today.”
Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to the federal government’s vaccine distribution effort, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that about 8 million doses will be distributed on Monday, about 5.9 million from the Modern vaccine and 2 million vaccine from Pfizer Inc. PFE,
He said the first shots of Moderna should be made Monday morning.
Also on Sunday, a committee of experts began considering who should be next in line for early doses of the Modern and Pfizer vaccine and the German BioNTech BNTX,
Pfizer shots were first shipped a week ago and began to be used the next day, launching the country’s largest vaccination campaign.
Public health experts say the traits (and others in progress) are the only way to stop a virus that has spread wildly. Nationwide, more than 219,000 people a day test positive for the virus, which has killed more than 316,000 in the United States and nearly 1.7 million worldwide.
Slaoui also predicted that the United States will experience “continued growth,” with as many coronavirus cases as possible from the Christmas meetings.
“I think, unfortunately, it will get worse,” he said.
The Pfizer and Moderna shots sent so far and in the coming weeks are almost all aimed at health workers and residents in long-term care homes, according to the advice of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
There will not be enough prey for the general population until spring, so doses will be rationed at least over the next few months. President-elect Joe Biden pledged to distribute 100 million doses in his first 100 days in office earlier this month, and his candidate for general surgeon said Sunday that it is still a realistic goal.
But Vivek Murthy, who spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said it’s more realistic to think it may be full of summer or fall before coronavirus vaccines become available to the general population. instead of late spring. Murthy said Biden’s team is working to have the shots available for lower-risk individuals in late spring, but to do so requires “everything to go exactly on schedule.”
“I think it’s more realistic to assume that it may be closer to mid-summer or early fall when this vaccine is targeted at the general population,” Murthy said. “So we want to be optimistic, but we also want to be prudent.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s general surgeon Jerome Adams defended the administrative treatment of the Pfizer vaccine on Sunday, a day after the army’s general accusation of obtaining COVID-19 vaccines in the United States was apologized on Saturday for “bad communication ”with the states on the number of doses delivered in the early stages of distribution. At least a dozen states reported receiving a second, smaller shipment of the Pfizer vaccine than they had been told before.
General Gustave Perna told reporters at a conference call that he made mistakes citing a number of doses he believed would be prepared. Slaoui said the mistake was to assume that the vaccines that had been produced were ready for shipment when there was a two-day delay.
“And unless it’s perfectly correct, we won’t release doses of vaccines for use,” he said. “And sometimes there can be little hiccups. In fact, now there has been none towards manufacturing. The hiccup was more in the planning. “
But Adams, speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” said “the numbers will go up and down.”
“It wasn’t absolutely bad planning,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then. There is what we really assign. There is what is delivered, and then there is what is really put in people’s arms.
Adams, who is black, said he understands that distrust of the medical community and the vaccine among blacks “comes from a real place,” the mistreatment of communities of color. He cited the Tuskegee experiment for decades in Alabama, where black men with syphilis were not treated so they could study the disease.
He also said U.S. immigrants should not be illegally denied the vaccine because of their legal status, because “it is not ethically correct to deny them.”
“I want to reassure people that when your information is collected to get your second vaccine, if you get the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, it will not be used in any way, form or form to legally harm you,” he said. Adams. “That’s something I’ve been assured of.”
Expert panel members opt to put “essential workers” at the forefront, because people like bus drivers, grocery store employees, and others become infected more often. But other experts say people 65 and older should be next, along with people with certain medical conditions, because they are the Americans who die at the highest rates.
The advice of the panel of experts is almost always approved by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Regardless of what the CDC says, there will be differences from state to state, because several health departments have different ideas about who should be closer to the front line.
Both the Modern Vaccine and the Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine require two separate doses several weeks. The second dose should be from the same company as the first. Both vaccines appeared safe and strongly protective in large yet unfinished studies.