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Now that the Food and Drug Administration has licensed Moderna’s vaccine, CDC advisers must now vote to recommend it, and the CDC must accept that recommendation before vaccines can begin. The advisory group is scheduled to meet on Saturday morning.
The second green light comes when hundreds of Americans across the country have already received their first dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, which was cleared by the FDA last week.
“This is the beginning of the end,” Adams told CNN on Friday night. “Make no mistake about it, it will be a tough couple of weeks. We still have work to do to overcome this increase, but I want people to cheer up.”
He said he chose to receive the vaccine on television because he wanted the American public to “understand that I have looked at the data, I have worked with companies and I felt safe receiving the vaccine.”
“Really, this is a message of life and death for black people about the coronavirus,” said Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice.
A raging pandemic that is far from over
Despite the promising news, it is not the end. In many parts of the US, Covid-19 is still wreaking havoc in communities.
- More than 18,000 Americans died from Covid-19 last week. The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that more than 237,000 more Americans will die of Covid-19 over the next three months.
- For the thirteenth day in a row, the country broke its own record for hospitalizations. There are now more than 114,700 Covid-19 patients in the US, according to the COVID monitoring project.
- Over the past week, the US reported an average of more than 219,000 new Covid-19 infections each day. On Friday, the country broke a record, reporting more than 249,700 new infections.
- Three Alaskan health workers had allergic reactions after receiving a dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine this week. The FDA has said that there is a “remote chance” that the vaccine will cause a serious allergic reaction. Because so many people are taking the vaccine at the same time, the public may perceive these serious reactions as much more common than they actually are.
Johns Hopkins Launches Vaccine Tracker
The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center has launched a new vaccine tracking tool that offers “daily updates and a national perspective on the progress of COVID-19 vaccine implementation” in the US.
Currently, the tool captures data from 10 states that have begun to publicly report the number of vaccines administered, including Connecticut, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.
“I want to warn everyone that there will be some setbacks because this is all so new,” said Beth Blauer, executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Centers for Civic Impact. “Data is spreading faster than we’ve ever seen a government data produced, so we have to give the states that are doing those reports a bit of grace.”
Massachusetts health officials said it was unclear why the dose numbers have changed.
“The Department of Public Health now expects to receive … a little over 145,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine by the end of December, an amount that has been reduced from 180,000, that’s about a 20% decrease,” said the Secretary of Health and human services, said Marylou Sudders.
“At this time, we are not clear why the shipment quantities have been adjusted,” he said. “We are certainly frustrated that we did not receive the amount that we expected in the first wave and we are working to clarify what this means,” added the governor.
A ‘mistake’ in the distribution excludes health workers
Only seven of the more than 1,300 medical residents and fellows were scheduled to receive the vaccine, and priority was given to teaching and medical assistants who work from home under Stanford Health’s distribution plan, the affiliate reported.
“Our intention was to develop an ethical and equitable process for the distribution of the vaccine,” Stanford Health Care said in a statement obtained by the news station.
“We apologize to our entire community, including our residents, fellows and other front-line care providers, who have performed heroically during our response to the pandemic. We are immediately reviewing our plan to better sequence vaccine distribution,” the statement says.
CNN has reached out to Stanford Health Care for comment.
Video taken by the affiliate showed people dressed in uniforms and personal protective equipment marching on Friday and chanting “Room first, end of line.”
“We were wrong. We are going to vaccinate them,” Entwistle told the crowd, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “We will correct it.”
Different states, different measurements
As state and federal officials prepare for more vaccine shipments, different parts of the country are reporting different Covid-19 trends.
In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said hospitals are in “crisis management” mode and capacity has been added at facilities across the state.
“I think hospitals are going to be able to handle this,” he said. “We learned a lot in the spring.”
“Los Angeles County is moving toward becoming the epicenter of the pandemic,” Dr. Brad Spellberg, medical director of the LAC + USC Medical Center, warned Friday.
“They are crushing us,” Spellberg added of the county hospitals. “I’m not sugarcoating this. They’re crushing us.”
In-person classes can resume at high schools and closed venues, such as movie theaters, can reopen with capacity limits and other safety precautions, the governor said. Group outdoor fitness activities and outdoor non-contact sports can also be resumed.
CNN’s Ben Tinker, Amanda Watts, Hollie Silverman, Deidre McPhillips, Jen Christensen and Arman Azad contributed to this report.
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