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Some doses of COVID-19[female[feminine The vaccine could begin distribution as early as mid-December, Vice President Mike Pence told governors nationwide on a conference call with the White House coronavirus task force on Monday.
“We strongly believe that the vaccine distribution process could begin as early as the week of Dec. 14,” Pence said, according to the audio of the call obtained by CBS News. “With the news this morning Modern joins Pfizer to submit Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), we continue to keep pace. “
The main objective of the call, which was led by the vice president, was to define the timeline for vaccine approval and distribution.
Food and Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn has not made a commitment on Dec. 14, but said the agency will make a decision regarding Pfizer’s USA after an external panel of experts met to review Pfizer’s application on December 10.
Hahn described the FDA’s process in evaluating vaccines for emergency use. “We do all the math ourselves,” he said. “We look line by line at all the data, all the patients and the manufacturing. We do statistical analysis and come to our own conclusions to support a thumbs up or down decision.”
The meeting agenda obtained by CBS News indicates that the first vaccine deliveries, by Pfizer, are scheduled to take place on December 15, and the first Moderna vaccines are expected to be delivered on December 22.
By the week of December 13-19, Pfizer plans to be ready to administer 6.4 million doses, enough to immunize approximately 3 million people, as they will require two injections, and an unknown number are reserve vaccine doses or rescue. The following week, Pfizer and Moderna are expected to produce enough to immunize an additional 10 million people. By the end of December, the two companies will have manufactured enough for a total of around 30 million people for the month.
But Pence told governors “we have a way to go” to reassure the public about the vaccine. Noting that they “have the pulpit of the bully” in their states, he urged them “to proactively educate the people of your state in the coming weeks to develop public confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine” .
The country’s leading infectious disease specialist, Dr Anthony Fauci, has vouched for the vaccines and said the approval process, although expedited, “does not compromise safety at all, nor does it compromise the scientific integrity. “
Fauci also praised the Moderna vaccine as being “very effective in preventing serious consequences”.
“Any false statement that the vaccines have had government or company interference is patently false,” he said.
“The data that came out today from Moderna indicated 30 serious outcomes, all of which occurred in the placebo, none of which occurred in the vaccines,” Fauci said. “This is really great news.”
Maine Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, has expressed disappointment with the number of doses her state would receive in the initial federal vaccine dose allocation. That’s “about a third of what we planned” – enough to immunize about 12,500 people.
“This is a real concern” because “our healthcare workforce here, like everywhere, is really short, the healthcare system is collapsing due to understaffing,” Mills said on the call.
Dr Deborah Birx concluded the call with an update on the spread of the disease. In the northern plains and rocky mountain states and in the Heartland, with the exception of Oklahoma, “we are finally seeing, after a very long period, a decrease in the number of hospitalizations,” he said. she declared. Birx has ordered governors who see hospitalizations refuse to be “very proactive in finding any asymptomatic spread after Thanksgiving.
She explained that hospitalization rates remain high because “they increase dramatically in all of the west coast states of Washington, Oregon and California, then again across the Sun Belt, but also between Indiana, Ohio. , Pennsylvania, to the mid-Atlantic. and the northeast. “
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