That amount could increase Covid-19 vaccination for states by 25% and be delivered in a day or two in the first week, said Lori Tremmel Freeman, executive director of the National Association of Municipal and Municipal Health Officials.
Vaccine administration is already increasing, with 2.2 million more vaccinations reported on Friday than the day before and about 70.5 million doses administered in total, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. USA diseases.
But with the variants spreading and threatening to send once in decline, rates of new cases have skyrocketed again, authorities hope to get ahead of the spread with faster inoculations.
“We already had two vaccines and now it looks like we are going to have three, which means that we can put more doses on the weapons and try to end this terrible pandemic,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said Wolf Blitzer of CNN.
New cases of coronavirus began to stabilize after a steady decline, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that they could be the “initial effects” of more communicable variants having an impact.
“The CDC has sounded the alarm about the continued spread of variants in the United States,” she said during a press conference at the White House on Friday.
Misconceptions that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is ‘second class’
The 22 members of the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted unanimously to recommend the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which one member said was an “easy decision”.
“It clearly goes beyond the limit and it is good to have a single dose vaccine,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
But some officials fear that the public will misunderstand how good the vaccine is and see it as “second class” – a misunderstanding that public health leaders will need to address.
“It is difficult to make an accurate comparison between authorized vaccines, based on data collected before new variants were widely circulated,” said Sarah Christopherson, director of policy advocacy for the National Women’s Health Network.
Although the Johnson & Johnson vaccine may appear to have a lower efficacy rate than its previous counterparts, that does not make it a worse option, because the latter appears to protect against some of the virus’s variants, said another committee member who recommended vaccine.
“One dose will keep you out of the hospital, keep you out of the intensive care unit and keep you out of the morgue,” said Dr. Paul Offit to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Several public health experts told Congress on Friday that people who have the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at their disposal should get it.
“If I had a J&J vaccine available today and a Modern vaccine available tomorrow, I would be happy to have J&J today. I don’t feel like I need to wait. All are excellent vaccines for the things that matter to us,” Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said at a hearing of the Chamber’s Subcommittee on Pathways and Means.
It’s not time to change doses
Promising news has also emerged for the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine.
Only one dose can induce an immune response strong enough in people who have already had Covid-19 to protect it from future infections, according to two new articles published in The Lancet magazine on Thursday.
The vaccine is currently administered in two doses, 21 days apart. The first dose prepares the immune system and the second stimulates it to protect against Covid-19.
Some officials have suggested prioritizing the administration of the first doses, to increase the immune response in as many people as possible quickly.
But with emerging variants, now is not the time to change the two-dose schedule for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a conversation with the Journal of a American Medical Association on Friday.
“Vaccines have been studied and approved, authorized, recommended as a two-dose schedule. Our programs are built on that. We communicate this to the public, ”she said. “I just don’t think there is still enough science to tell us that it is a time to change what we know to be an effective regime.”
CNN’s Jacqueline Howard, Deidre McPhillips, Lauren Mascarenhas, Nicholas Neville, Maggie Fox, Jen Christensen, Jamie Gumbrecht and Virginia Langmaid contributed to this report.