US coronavirus: “healthy, young” Americans are likely to get the Covid-19 vaccine in mid-summer, according to the expert

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“The best way to prevent the emergence of new variants is to do all the things we’ve been talking about for months,” Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease expert, told CNN on Sunday night. “The more you let the virus spread, the more it will mutate, the more variants you will have.”

But the United States continues to add up an impressive number of cases on a daily basis and faces several major vaccine challenges. States say they do not have enough doses and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said Sunday that information on supply is lacking.

“I would say one of the biggest problems right now is that I can’t tell you what vaccine we have,” Walensky told Fox News. “If I can’t tell you, I can’t tell the governors or tell the state health officials.”

“If they don’t know what vaccine they’re getting, not just this week, but next week and next, they can’t plan.”

It will likely be months before the vaccine is widely available to the U.S. public, said Gounder, who is also a member of the Biden Covid-19 transition advisory committee.

“We’re probably watching mid-summer, late summer before the healthy, middle-aged American has access to vaccination,” Gounder told CNN Sunday.

Send us your questions for President Biden’s Covid-19 team

The United States should boost its vaccination target, according to the expert

But while the launch has been slower than many experts expected, the director of the National Institutes of Health says it’s not as bad now as some do.

“We’re now doing an average of nearly a million daily doses in guns, and that’s a pretty good trajectory to get where President Biden wants,” Dr. Francis Collins told MSNBC on Saturday.

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Biden has previously pledged to manage 100 million shots in his first 100 days in office, a goal that some have criticized as too modest.

“We have to do more than a million shots a day,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, told CNN on Sunday.

Currently, most vaccines that are given are first-dose, Reiner said.

“But as we move forward, more and more vaccines every day will be the second vaccination, so the number of new vaccines will start to go down to a point in the not too distant future where vaccines are given every day. they are 50% follow-up and 50% new vaccinations “.

“We need to do better. We need to vaccinate about two million people a day. That should be the goal,” Reiner added.

Agencies increase surveillance of the variant

Meanwhile, Walensky also said Sunday that the CDC and other agencies were expanding surveillance and studies of new variants, so that “we can control those variants and control” the impact they can have on vaccines.

The variant called B.1.1.7, first identified in the UK, has already been detected in more than 20 states and, according to the CDC, is more easily transmitted. Dr. Anthony Fauci said it may also be more harmful.
CDC reviewing new data suggesting coronavirus variant identified in UK may be more deadly

“We have to assume now that what has circulated predominantly in the UK has a certain degree of increase in what we call virulence, that is, the power of the virus to cause more damage, including death,” Fauci told CBS Sunday.

Studies to date suggest that vaccines will protect against variant B.1.1.7. But at least two studies have found another variant, the first detected in South Africa, that could pose a problem for vaccines.

So far, this variant has not been detected in the US, but “we need to greatly expand our genomic surveillance,” Fauci said.

“We know it hadn’t been at the level we would have liked, but now there’s a lot of movement at the CDC level, including some input from the NIH and other organizations, to drastically increase what we call genomic surveillance.”

“We need to be prepared” for more virus changes

For many experts, the variants are worrisome but not surprising.

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The most important lesson to be learned is that the virus will continue to change, and the United States must be prepared for it, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Biden’s candidate for general surgeon of the United States, told ABC on Sunday. USA.

“We are in a race against these variants, viruses are exchanged and it is up to us to adapt and make sure we are ahead,” he said.

Murthy said this means there needs to be much better monitoring so that variants can be identified when they arise, that public health measures need to be duplicated, and that there is more investment in treatment strategies.

“Above all, that means we have to invest a lot more in testing and contact tracking, because they will also be essential,” Murthy added.

CNN’s Naomi Thomas and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report.

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