More than 2 million people in the United States have received a Chinese coronavirus vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
According to the agency’s update on Monday, 11,445,175 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were distributed in the United States, although only 2,127,143 received the first dose, according to Monday’s data.
On Christmas Eve, the CDC reported that more than 1 million had received the vaccine.
The news comes at a time when leading public health officials emphasize the importance of receiving the vaccine. They further emphasize that achieving an appearance of normality in 2021 depends a lot on what Dr. Anthony Fauci described as vaccinating the “overwhelming majority” of the population.
“It will depend on our success in vaccinating what I would say is an overwhelming majority of the population, between 70 to 85 percent,” said Fauci during an appearance at PODCAST-19 last week.
“If we can do this, by the end of the summer, I think that as we enter autumn, October, November, times like this, I think we will be very close to a degree of normality,” he added.
Likewise, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) said on Monday that the 2021 course, or a “post-COVID future”, depends a lot on “putting these vaccines in people’s arms now”.
“How is 2021? 2021 looks like what we’re going to do. It will be what we will do and, of course, the key will be the vaccine ”, he said.
“It is the only really good news we had in 2020 – it was that the research community, the medical community, came up with highly effective vaccines,” he continued.
“So it’s about putting these vaccines in people’s arms now, right? … But what matters is to put him in people’s arms ”, underlined Cuomo.
Vaccines, so far, have been limited to frontline health professionals as well as to the most vulnerable populations, although members of Congress may also receive the vaccine. Some, like Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), have expressed their opposition to lawmakers who receive the vaccine before the most vulnerable members of the population.
The CDC reported 19,055,869 cumulative cases of the Wuhan virus across the country on Monday.