AJC TOP NATIONAL STORY CORONAVIRUS
All Americans who want to get a COVID-19 vaccine should be able to do so by the second quarter of next year, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Sunday as Trump administration officials laid out an ambitious timetable for the rollout of the first vaccine in the United States.
Moncef Slaoui, the head of the government’s Operation Warp Speed to accelerate a vaccine, echoed Azar’s optimism, rejecting President-elect Joe Biden’s criticism that there was “no detailed plan that we’ve seen” for getting people immunized.
Slaoui said his group plans to have its first meeting with Biden’s transition team this week.
“And I feel confident that once we will explain it, everything in detail, I hope the new transition teams will understand that things are well planned,” said Slaoui, a former head of GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s vaccines division.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is due to decide as early as Thursday on emergency authorization for a shot developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.
“I’ve not heard of any red flags, but I’ll have to leave that to the career scientists at the FDA who were digging through all the data,” Azar said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Plans to roll out vaccines against the coronavirus are gaining urgency as cases reach new highs nationwide, straining hospital care and the economy, particularly in urban hot spots.
The virus is blamed for more than 280,000 deaths and more than 14.6 million confirmed infections in the U.S. New cases per day have rocketed to an all-time high of more than 190,000 on average. Deaths per day have surged to an average of more than 2,160, a level last seen during the dark days in April.
The number of Americans now in the hospital with the coronavirus topped 100,000 for the first time over the past few days.
Slaoui said residents of long-term care facilities will receive the first round of vaccinations by mid-January, perhaps even by the end of December. In some states, this group accounts for about 40% of deaths from the coronavirus.
“By end of the month of January, we should already see quite a significant decrease in mortality in the elderly population,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Barring unexpected problems with manufacturing the vaccine, most Americans at high risk from coronavirus infection should be vaccinated by mid-March, and the rest of the population by May or June, he said.
“For our lives to start getting back to normal, we’re talking about April or May,” Slaoui said.
Biden sounded a considerably more skeptical note Friday, saying that there was “no detailed plan that we’ve seen, anyway, as to how you get the vaccine out of a container, into an injection syringe, into somebody’s arm.”
Slaoui defended the proposed immunization schedule for the first 40 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which requires two shots three or four weeks apart. If all of the doses were used up to give 40 million people an initial shot, that would create the risk of shortfalls for the required second shot, Slaoui said.
Meanwhile, top health officials warned Americans that this is no time to let their guard down.
“The vaccine’s critical,” Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But it’s not going to save us from this current surge. Only we can save us from this current surge.”
With the U.S. facing what could be a catastrophic winter, officials are urging Americans to wear masks, practice social distancing and follow other basic measures — precautions that President Donald Trump and members of the administration have sometimes disdained.
“I hear community members parroting back those situations — parroting back that masks don’t work, parroting back that we should work towards herd immunity, parroting back that gatherings don’t result in super-spreading events,”
Birx said. “And I think our job is to constantly say those are myths, they are wrong and you can see the evidence base.”
In California, the first place to enact a statewide lockdown last spring, new stayat-home orders were set to take effect Sunday night in Southern California, much of the San Francisco Bay area and other areas.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said he hopes the new lockdown order is the last one he has to issue, declaring the vaccines offer “light at the end of the tunnel.”
Information from The New York Times, Bloomberg and the Associated Press was included in this report.