American coronavirus: United States can vaccinate up to 85% of American adults and start a return to normalcy by fall, according to Fauci



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“When you put … the pedal to the ground, you can do it,” Fauci told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Thursday.

At the current rate of vaccinations, that necessary threshold will not be reached until February 2022, but Fauci said officials must and will speed up production and distribution by “getting community vaccination centers, fully involving pharmacies, using mobile units to enter inaccessible areas. places. “

Fauci’s assessment offers a silver lining as forecasts predict the death toll from the virus will likely hit 500,000 within the next month.

“The only way to solve a problem is to own it,” he said. “Everyone wears a mask, everyone adheres to public health measures, takes out the vaccine as quickly as possible, does everything possible to get the available doses and put them in people’s arms.”

Seniors spend hours waiting in Los Angeles

More than a million coronavirus vaccines were given as of Thursday – the second time that many doses have been given in a day, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And although that brought the total to more than 17.5 million doses administered, officials say they are not receiving the vaccines quickly enough to meet demand.

CNN Poll: Americans'  the desire to be vaccinated against the coronavirus is on the rise

In Georgia, authorities see high numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, and the 120,000 doses allocated to the state per week are not enough to immunize the elderly and other high-risk residents, the governor said Brian Kemp.

“We’re always going to have a lot more demand than supply,” Kemp said.

Constraints on supplies in New York mean that there aren’t enough doses to immunize members of the NYPD and FDNY, the agencies told CNN on Thursday. There is still enough for those who have already made appointments and those who have already received their first dose, the FDNY said.

Queues at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on Thursday were largely filled with people over 65, some waiting five hours for the vaccine, Mayor Eric Garcetti said.

“There may be a wait … so use the toilet in advance, bring water and snacks, and make sure your gas tank is full or your car is charged”, a- he declared.

President Joe Biden’s choice for surgeon general Dr Vivek Murthy said the United States must do more to speed up vaccinations.

“We cannot take a year to reach the critical levels of immunization that we need in this country,” Murthy told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “We have to get there sooner.”

Even with reports of many people lining up, about six in 10 Americans do not know when or where to get the coronavirus vaccine, according to a new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Most Americans do not know when and where they can get vaccinated, including older Americans, who are already eligible for vaccination in a growing number of states, ”the chief executive officer said on Friday. KFF, Drew Altman, in press release. a lot of people are frustrated, angry and confused. ”

New vaccines could be on the way

Officials hope new coronavirus vaccines will be approved and help speed up administration.

Currently, the United States has approved vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna.

However, Johnson & Johnson is conducting “very large” clinical trials and plans to have “enough vaccines for 100 million Americans by the spring,” board member Dr. Mark McClellan told CNBC on Thursday. administration.

Dr Fauci said the company’s vaccine was “just around the corner” from the FDA’s emergency use authorization application.

“They’re probably weeks away from reviewing the data, for the FDA to assess if we’re in a situation where we could go ahead and start thinking about releasing it to the public,” he said. .

States call for more doses of coronavirus vaccine as U.S. death toll surpasses 400,000

The new vaccine will have benefits, he said. It will come all at once and it won’t need to stay in the cold climate that has made storing and transporting existing vaccines so difficult, Fauci said.

“AstraZeneca isn’t quite there yet, you know it’s the one that’s being tested in multiple countries, but it’s a little late, but not too far away,” Fauci said.

The federal government’s Operation Warp Speep program last week said it hoped to get clearance by the end of March, Chief Advisor Moncef Slaoui said.

“Hopefully the vaccine will be effective again, as trials in Brazil and the UK have shown,” Slaoui said. “So maybe an approval somewhere around the end of March, and a significant number of doses available at that time.”

Michael Nedelman, Deidre McPhillips, Maria Cartaya, Lindsay Benson, Lauren Mascarenhas, Alexandra Meeks, Evan Simko-Bednarski, Andrea Diaz, Jacqueline Howard and Nick Neville contributed to this report.

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