US coronavirus: States are preparing to receive vaccines as early as December 11
Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, said Tuesday that states have not been given a date to expect shipments of coronavirus vaccines, but they’re preparing to receive them as early as December 11.
“The CDC is telling us, ‘You need to be ready,'” Hannan said.
To prepare, states are testing their vaccine data systems — submitting files that are then received by a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention clearinghouse.
“All the states are going through testing,” said Hannan, whose association is helping states with their immunization plans. “Everybody’s got to pass that test to make sure that they can transmit data, that their providers are enrolled successfully, that they can transmit orders and receive communication in the data system.”
Upcoming holiday gatherings around Christmas and Hanukkah could further spread infections to loved ones.
As officials concern themselves with rising case numbers, they are preparing for the first wave of vaccine distributions.
Stephen Hoge, the president of Moderna, told NBC that they are “quite optimistic” when it comes to authorization of their Covid-19 vaccine candidate.
Once the US Food and Drug Administration grants EUAs and the CDC makes recommendations on which groups will get the vaccines first, they will be ready to be shipped out, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, Operation Warp Speed chief scientific adviser, said Monday. And that very day or the next, the first immunizations can be administered, he said.
Panel debates who gets vaccines first
Two Covid-19 vaccines are expected to be ready soon, and already one thing is clear: There won’t be enough vaccines to go around.
Although federal officials expect to have 40 million doses of coronavirus vaccine available by the end of December, those doses will not all be available at once, CDC vaccine advisers were told Tuesday. CDC’s Dr. Sara Oliver told the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that the CDC expects between 5 million and 10 million doses to become available each week for the first few months as vaccine makers ramp up manufacturing.
Vaccinations are expected to begin in mid- to late December, depending on other approvals. The panel is set Tuesday to vote on whether the first group to be vaccinated should be health care workers and residents of nursing homes.
If those two groups are first — or “Phase 1a” in CDC parlance — then other high priority groups will have to wait, including people with underlying medical conditions, essential workers such as police officers and firefighters, and elderly people who are not in nursing homes.
ACIP chair Dr. Jose Romero said to expect frontline health care workers to get the first wave of vaccines.
“It seems pretty clear that the top group of individuals will be health care providers,” Romero told CNN’s “New Day.”
Each state will then decide who within that group of providers will get the vaccine first.
“Anybody that works within a health care institution that could have contact with an individual who has Covid should receive vaccination,” Romero added. “That includes individuals such as the persons delivering food, those persons in housekeeping who rapidly turn over rooms in the emergency room or who perform cleaning in the patient’s rooms. Those individuals will be included.”
Florida surpasses 1 million cases
But even after vaccines start to be distributed in December, there won’t be enough for the wider public to be immunized until April or May of 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, said. Until then, the US is still contending with an unprecedented spike.
Florida became the third state to surpass 1 million cumulative Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, following behind Texas and California, according to the Florida State Department of Health.
In Minnesota, more than a third of counties are 10 times over what would be considered a high-risk threshold for infection rate growth as the state is in “the worst spot we’ve been in since March,” Minnesota Department…
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