Hundreds more hospitals across U.S. begin dispensing COVID-19 vaccine, giving health workers hope.
Moderna’s shot moves closer to OK’D by FDA
WASHINGTON – Hundreds more hospitals around the country began dispensing COVID-19 shots to their workers in a rapid expansion of the U.S. vaccination drive Tuesday, while a second vaccine moved to the cusp of government authorization.
A day after the rollout of Pfizer-bionTech’s coronavirus shots, the Food and Drug Administration said its preliminary analysis confirmed the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine developed by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health. A panel of outside experts is expected to vote to recommend the formula Thursday, with the FDA’S greenlight coming soon thereafter.
The Moderna vaccine uses the same technology as Pfizer-biontech’s and showed similarly strong protection against COVID-19, but it is easier to handle because it does not need to be kept in a deep freeze at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit.
Another weapon against the outbreak can’t come soon enough: The number of dead in the U.S. passed a staggering 300,000 on Monday, according to Johns Hopkins University, with about 2,400 deaths and more than 210,000 new cases per day on average.
Packed in dry ice, shipments of the Pfizer-biontech vaccine began arriving Tuesday at more than 400 additional hospitals and other distribution sites.
The first 3 million shots are being strictly rationed to front-line health workers and nursing home patients, with hundreds of millions more shots needed over the coming months to protect most Americans.
The rollout provided a measure of encouragement to exhausted doctors, nurses and other hospital staffers around the country.
Maritza Beniquez has had a frontrow seat to the devastation the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought on communities of color in New Jersey, so she jumped at the chance to take the vaccine that is being hailed as a turning point in the long and grueling battle against the virus.
The 56-year-old emergency room nurse at Newark’s University Hospital became the first person in New Jersey to receive the vaccine Tuesday. All recipients will get a second shot a few weeks later.
“I’m happy that in another month and a half I won’t have to be afraid to go into a room anymore. I won’t have to be afraid to perform chest compressions or be present when they’re intubating a patient,” Beniquez said. “I don’t want to be afraid anymore, and I don’t want to have that risk of taking it home to my own family and my own friends.”
Widespread acceptance of the vaccine is critical to eventually protecting enough of the U.S. population to defeat the outbreak. But just half of Americans say they want to get vaccinated, while about a quarter don’t, and the rest are unsure, according to a recent poll by the Associated PRESS-NORC Center for Public Health Research.