Vaccine rollout ramps up
New COVID-19 strain in Britain is another good reason to avoid travel.
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The focus this week will mostly be on the House and Senate acting on a COVID-19 relief measure and the ramp-up of vaccine distribution. The Moderna vaccine, which was granted Emergency Use Authorization by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, started reaching distribution sites today. Operation Warp Speed’s leaders say 11 million vaccinations will be distributed by the end of next week. Getting them into people will take longer.
Britain’s announcement of a possibly more contagious mutation of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, has caused new travel restrictions and alarm, but experts say that the discovery in Britain and South Africa does not warrant changes to public health recommendations — and the new vaccines are likely to be effective against this strain and others.
Over the weekend, the CDC’s vaccine advisors recommended that after the highest priority individuals get vaccinated, the next tier should include all adults 75 and older and frontline “essential” workers such as grocery store and transit employees.
President-elect Joe Biden received his first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine on camera today.
The vaccine recommendations are based on a balance between preventing sickness and death and keeping society functioning.
This is why the top tier included the most essential — healthcare workers to take care of the sick — and the most vulnerable, residents of long-term care facilities such as nursing homes.
The “tier 1b” group includes essential workers who are at “substantially higher” COVID-19 risk because of those jobs. Essential workers who have lower risk, such as people who manage transportation or logistics or work in service positions but not in direct public contact, are in tier 1c.
Based on these latest recommendations, vaccines for the general population will be start becoming available in April.
Getting healthcare workers to accept the vaccinations is proving a challenge, especially among Black healthcare professionals, a reflection of hesitancy throughout the nation.
The surge of COVID-19 cases across the country has prompted hospitals to again revise how COVID-19 patients are treated, in many instances, holding back on earlier treatments that had become more common.
The Atlantic’s Ed Jong has published another masterpiece of science journalism. This time, he documents the many ways that science has rallied to combat COVID-19 — and the many ways that scientists or others have made missteps. The article also foreshadows some of the ways that the science of COVID-19 may change some aspects of science forever.