US vaccinations ramp up as 2nd COVID-19 shot nears

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 recommend the formula Thursday, with the FDA’s green light coming soon thereafter.

The Moderna vaccine uses the same technology as PfizerBioNTech’s and showed similarly strong protection against COVID-19 but is easier to handle because it does not need to be kept in the 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 people now dying per day on average.

The devastating toll is only expected to grow in the coming weeks, fueled by travel over Christmas and New Year’s, family gatherings and lax adherence to mask-wearing and other precautions.

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 frontline 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 front-row 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 PressNORC Center for Public Health Research.

In Manchester, N.H., intensive care unit nurse Heidi Kukla said she volunteered to get the shot first to help dispel fears about the vaccine’s longterm effects and the speed with which it was developed.

“I know a lot of people have reservations about getting the vaccine,” she said after getting vaccinated at Elliot Hospital. “But I can assure you that there is absolutely nothing worse than being a patient on a ventilator in an ICU anywhere in this country right now with COVID.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a childhood polio survivor, urged elected officials to “step up” and get vaccinated.

“We really need to get the country vaccinated,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do for yourself, for your family and for the country.”