One million Americans receive vaccine but shots fail to keep pace with distribution
More than a million Americans received the first dose of their Covid-19 vaccines, a milestone in the biggest immunisation drive in US history.
The number of cases across the country is surging, with the death toll going past 334,000. This makes Covid- 19 the third-leading cause of deaths this year.
“While we celebrate this historic milestone, we also acknowledge the challenging path ahead,” said Dr Robert Redfield, director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
“There is currently a limited supply of Covid-19 vaccine in the US, but supply will increase in the weeks and months to come.”
About three million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were shipped last week alone, and vaccination started on December 14.
Moncef Slaoui, a scientific adviser to the US government, said the objective of injecting 20 million people this month was unlikely to be met and a lag was beginning to emerge between doses being distributed to sites and shots being administered to patients.
Even so, he was confident of being able to inoculate 100 million people in the first quarter of next year, and another 100 million by the second quarter.
Although the goals are ambitious, the government’s programme has delivered on its objective of bringing vaccines from the laboratory bench to authorisation within a year.
It required running the various stages of testing in parallel and mass-producing doses before they had been proven safe and effective, ready for use if they succeeded.
It might be possible to achieve widespread population immunity in the US by next summer, infectious disease official Dr Anthony Fauci said.
He also suggested people could host weddings as early as June or July, and said he believed priority populations, such as nursing- home residents, healthcare workers and the elderly, should receive inoculations by March or early April.
“We could start in April doing what I call ‘open season’ on vaccinations – namely anybody in the general population who wants to get vaccinated will get vaccinated,” Dr Fauci told WebMD on Wednesday.
He said that between 70 and 80 per cent of the US population could be vaccinated by mid to late summer.
“When that occurs, there will be an umbrella of protection over the entire country.”
On Tuesday, the Donald Trump administration said it had bought an additional 100 million doses of the PfizerBioNTech vaccine, with inoculations scheduled to be delivered by July.
That brings the US supply of vaccines to 400 million doses – half from Pfizer-BioNTech and half from Moderna – allowing the country to immunise 200 million people.
Many more vaccines are in development worldwide, with products from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca potentially next in line.
On Sunday, an expert committee said people aged 75 and older should be vaccinated next, along with 30 million people deemed to be “essential frontline workers”, including teachers, shop staff and police officers.
But on Wednesday, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, said people over the age of 65 would be immunised before essential workers, many of whom were “very young”.