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The news comes after the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine cleared one of its latest hurdles: approval for people 16 and older. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accepted the recommendation of an advisory committee to that effect Saturday night, meaning it can now be administered in U.S.
In a statement released Sunday, Redfield announced that it had accepted the recommendation of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The first vaccines are “scheduled to begin Monday,” he said.
“This is the next step in our efforts to protect Americans, reduce the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and help restore some normalcy in our lives and in our country,” he said in a statement.
US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn also said his “greatest hope and wish” is for vaccinations to begin Monday.
“My hope, again, is that this happens very quickly, hopefully tomorrow,” Hahn told CNN on Sunday. “We have seen the vaccines come out. We have seen the press reports of hospitals waiting to vaccinate health workers and the most vulnerable.”
The decision comes the same day the first batch of vaccines was loaded onto trucks at a Pfizer plant in Portage, Michigan, and shipped across the country.
Cargo trucks carrying about 184,275 vials of vaccine left the plant, and the combined 189 boxes of vaccine vials are expected to reach all 50 states on Monday.
Another 3,900 vials are expected to be shipped to US territories later Sunday, and 400 boxes packed with roughly 390,000 vials will ship Monday to arrive Tuesday. There are five doses of vaccine per vial, according to Pfizer.
The excitement surrounding the shipment even caused small groups of onlookers to cheer. At Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the vaccine was loaded onto a FedEx cargo plane, Vicki Royce and her husband gathered outside the facility.
“This is so exciting. This is history!” Royce said. “The first vaccines are coming out. I’m like crying here.”
“This is a very good day for the United States and for the world,” Moncef Slaoui, head of coronavirus vaccination efforts in the United States, told Fox News on Sunday.
The United States plans to distribute 40 million doses of vaccines by the end of the year, followed by 50 to 80 million doses in January and February, according to Slaoui.
“In total, we expect to have immunized 100 million people” by the end of the first quarter of 2021, Slaoui said on Fox News Sunday.
The vaccine comes at a critical time for the United States. Covid-19 hospitalizations reached record levels for the seventh consecutive day on Saturday. With winter break still ahead, experts warn that the pandemic could continue to worsen before the general public receives the vaccine.
Experts like Hahn and members of the CDC’s ACIP have said they have faith in the vaccine’s evaluation.
“I believe that the process we have used here at ACIP to reach this decision is transparent, science-based, fair-minded, and is, at this time, the best we can do,” said the ACIP member. , Dr. Beth Bell, clinical professor of global health at the University of Washington.
The president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Susan Bailey, said in a statement Saturday that the biggest obstacle to the vaccine is people’s willingness to get vaccinated.
“To be clear, these vaccines will reduce death and serious illness. They have been rigorously evaluated, and if enough of us roll up our sleeves and get vaccinated, we can eventually get back to normal,” he said.
Wave upon wave
Most Americans will have to wait months before they can get the vaccine, and until then many states are expected to continue to experience an unprecedented number of new infections.
Arizona reported its second-highest number of new cases on Saturday at 8,076, reaching a new record positivity rate of 25%, indicating viral transmission is increasing faster than case counts indicate, according to a study. in progress from Zuckerman College of the University of Arizona. of Public Health.
The California Department of Public Health reported 35,729 new cases of coronavirus on Saturday, breaking the previous record set Friday of 35,468 new cases.
For three straight days, Florida reported more than 10,000 cases a day before reporting 8,964 cases Sunday, a CNN tally shows. The state has reported 7,000 or more new cases each day this month.
With the fallout from Thanksgiving trips and gatherings still unfolding, health officials warn that impacts on communities could soon get worse.
Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer issued a grim warning over the next few weeks, after announcing Friday that the county has doubled its number of new daily cases in about 10 days.
“The problem right now is what we call the Thanksgiving surge,” Ferrer said. “We had a raise, and now we have a raise as well as a raise, and it’s really hard for us to calculate exactly what we’re going to see in the next week or two.”
“We are on a very dangerous path to see unprecedented and catastrophic suffering and death here in Los Angeles County if we cannot stop the increase,” Ferrer said.
Overloaded hospitals in the US
The average number of new daily cases over the past week was 210,764, another high pandemic, according to a CNN analysis of Johns Hopkins data.
Hospitals across the country have felt the impact. Data from the US Department of Health and Human Services shows that more than 85% of hospitals had more Covid-19 patients last week than a month ago. Overall, about one in five hospitalized patients was confirmed to have Covid-19 in the past week, nearly double the previous month.
In the nation’s 10 largest cities, the proportion of hospital patients who had the virus ranged from 9% in New York to 23% in Chicago. In El Paso, Texas, more than 50% of patients in city hospitals had Covid-19 between November 27 and December 3. That’s almost double the national average for that period.
As of Saturday, there were more than 13,000 Covid-19 patients in California hospitals, a record for the state and a 3.5% increase compared to the previous day, according to the California Department of Public Health. The state also reported a record 35,729 new cases.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly indicated the number of doses of coronavirus vaccine the US plans to distribute by the end of the year. They are 40 million.
Eliott C. McLaughlin, Dakin Andone, Dianne Gallagher, John Bonifield, Christina Maxouris, Lauren Mascarenhas, Artemis Moshtaghian, Melissa Alonso, Maggie Fox, Haley Brink, Andrea Diaz, Shelby Lin Erdman, Jamie Gumbrecht, Kay Jones, Deidre McPhillips, Pete de CNN Muntean, Alta Spells, Greg Wallace, and Chuck Johnston contributed to this report.
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