Covid-19 Live Updates: Officials Stress That the Pandemic ‘Is Not Over Yet’ as U.S. Vaccinations Begin

Because the supply of COVID-19 vaccine in the United States will be limited at first, CDC recommends that initial supplies of COVID-19 vaccine be allocated to healthcare personnel and long-term care facility residents. CDC made this recommendation on December 3, 2020, and based it on recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an independent panel of medical and public health experts.

As vaccine availability increases, vaccination recommendations will expand to include more groups

The goal is for everyone to be able to easily get a COVID-19 vaccination as soon as large quantities of vaccine are available. As vaccine supply increases but remains limited, ACIP will expand the groups recommended for vaccination.

The U.S. has a vaccine, but it doesn’t mean you can let your guard down.

A coronavirus test site at Grand Canyon University in Arizona on Saturday.Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

While the start of the U.S. mass vaccination campaign this week has brought desperately needed hope, health experts warned on Wednesday that it’s far too soon to abandon common-sense precautions that can halt the spread of the virus. Visit Full News : https://unworldoceansday.org/user/6678

The first shots of a vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech were administered on Monday, and another vaccine, made by Moderna, is expected to receive emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration this week. Both were highly effective in preventing Covid-19 in clinical trials, but it will be months before a broad-enough swath of the population could receive doses, and officials are scrambling to combat skepticism about the vaccines.

“As wonderful as this is, because it’s been an extraordinary manifestation of the fruits of science done in a very rapid way, it’s also bittersweet,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said of the country’s split-screen reality on “CBS This Morning” on Wednesday.

As the doses are distributed throughout the states, the virus continues to engulf the country. The death toll passed 300,000 in the United States on Monday, more than any other country, just as the first injections of the vaccine were going into the arms of frontline health care workers. Nearly 3,000 new deaths were reported on Tuesday, while new cases exceeded 200,000. The seven-day average of new cases is up 28 percent from two weeks ago. Visit Full News : https://unworldoceansday.org/user/6681

Hospitalizations have surpassed 112,000, and I.C.U. units in some areas are close to capacity.

“We already are seeing in certain regions of the country, that the health care system — the hospital beds, the number of trained personnel, particularly individuals who are trained in intensive care — that is stretching to the limit in some places,” Dr. Fauci said on CNBC’s Healthy Returns livestream on Wednesday.

“We should celebrate the fact that the science has come through,” he said, “but it is not over yet. We have a ways to go. We have to abide by the public health measures that we talk about all the time.”

Those public health measures, of course, include social distancing, wearing masks, avoiding travel and indoor gatherings and frequent hand washing. Dr. Fauci called them “the bridge to get to the vaccine, which is going to get us out of this.”Visit Full News : https://unworldoceansday.org/user/6683

Then there is the question of persuading people to take a vaccine. Dr. Fauci noted that some people are hesitant because of the speed with which the vaccines were developed. But he argued that the speed was a reflection of “extraordinary scientific advances in vaccine platform technology” and enormous investment.

“We hope that the overwhelming percentage of the population will accept the vaccine,” he said. (In an interview with the Vox podcast “Today, Explained” on Tuesday, Dr. Fauci said that he hoped that as many as 85 percent of Americans would get it.)

“If we do that, we will get a veil, or an umbrella, of herd immunity over the population that would dramatically diminish the dynamics of the outbreak. When we do that, then that would be the end of this outbreak. So it’s going to take months to do, but we certainly are on the right track.”

Adm. Brett P. Giroir, who heads up national testing efforts, also stressed the need to continue protective measures on Wednesday, urging Americans to wear masks and avoid travel and crowds over the holidays.

He noted that the Midwest appeared to have turned a corner as case rates improve. But outbreaks continue to escalate in the Northeast, the South and on the West Coast.Visit Full News : https://unworldoceansday.org/user/6688

“We are still at a dangerous and critical part of this pandemic and tens of thousands of American lives are at stake really every week,” he said on CNN’s “New Day,” even as “the end of the pandemic is in sight.” Visit Full News : https://unworldoceansday.org/user/6692

“But until we get a few more months down the road, do your best. Save lives, save American lives, save global lives, just by doing these simple measures. If you do that, we’re going to be in really good shape. But if you don’t, we’re going to have thousands of more casualties in this country that we can avoid.”

— Karen Zraick

The U.S. and Pfizer are negotiating a deal for more vaccine doses next year.

Hospital staff at the Jefferson Regional Medical Center receiving the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday.Credit…Andrea Morales for The New York Times

The Trump administration is negotiating a deal to use its power to free up supplies of raw materials to help Pfizer produce tens of millions of additional doses of its Covid-19 vaccine for Americans in the first half of next year, people familiar with the situation said.

Should an agreement be struck, it could at least partially remedy a looming shortage that the administration itself arguably helped create by not pre-ordering more doses of the vaccine Pfizer developed with its German partner, BioNTech. Pfizer agreed this summer to provide the United States with 100 million doses by the end of March, enough to inoculate 50 million people since its vaccine requires two shots.

The Pfizer vaccine is one of only two so far that have been proved to work. The Trump administration has locked in only enough doses of the two vaccines — the other, produced by Moderna, is on track to receive emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration this week — to cover 150 million people by the end of June, or less than half the nation.

The administration recently asked Pfizer to sell it enough doses to cover an additional 50 million Americans, but Pfizer said it had already found customers around the world for all the doses it can produce until around the middle of next year.

In recent days, however, Pfizer has indicated that it would be able to manufacture more doses if the administration orders the company’s suppliers to prioritize its purchase requests. The two sides are now negotiating a contract under which Pfizer would provide tens of millions more doses from April to the end of June.

According to one person familiar with the situation, Pfizer asked for that favored status with suppliers months ago. But before it was clear which vaccine trials would succeed, Trump administration officials were apparently worried about hindering other vaccine makers that had accepted billions of dollars in federal subsidies. Federal officials worked to prioritize orders for manufacturing supplies from those firms, including Moderna.

It is unclear whether the government’s concerns about squeezing the supply chain have now faded, or whether its interest in securing more of Pfizer’s vaccine has simply grown. Pfizer announced in November that clinical trials had shown that its vaccine was about 95 percent effective, and the firm was the first to win approval from the F.D.A. for emergency use of its vaccine.

After the company signed a contract last July pledging to sell the United States 100 million doses by the end of March, Pfizer officials suggested at least twice that the Trump administration reserve more doses, but were turned down, according to people familiar with the situation.

Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, told “PBS News Hour” on Monday that in early October, the government resumed negotiations with Pfizer about delivering more doses. But he said Pfizer “resisted giving us any date by which they would do it.”

Moderna, a small Massachusetts-based firm that developed a similar vaccine, agreed last summer to provide the United States with 100 million doses by the end of March. It has now pledged to sell another 100 million doses by the end of June.

— Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland

An Alaska health worker had a serious allergic reaction after getting Pfizer’s vaccine.

Pfizer’s trial in the United States involving more than 40,000 people did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, although many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects. Credit…Grant Hindsley for The New York Times

A health care worker in Alaska had a serious allergic reaction after getting Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine on Tuesday and remained hospitalized on Wednesday morning under observation.

The middle-aged worker had no history of allergies, but had an anaphylactic reaction that began 10 minutes after receiving the vaccine at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau, Alaska, a hospital official said. The reaction included flushing and shortness of breath.

Dr. Lindy Jones, the emergency department medical director at the hospital, said the reaction subsided soon after the worker was treated with epinephrine. He said the worker remained enthusiastic th