Doses of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine started being shipped
White House defends Pfizer vaccine delivery
OLIVE BRANCH, Miss. — Initial shipments of the second COVID-19 vaccine authorized in the U.S. left a distribution center Sunday, a desperately needed boost as the nation works to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control.
The trucks left the Memphis-area factory with the vaccine developed by Moderna Inc. and the National Institutes of Health. The much-needed shots are expected to be given starting Monday, just three days after the Food and Drug Administration authorized their emergency rollout.
Public health experts say the shots and others in the pipeline are the only way to stop a virus that has been spreading wildly. Nationwide, more than 219,000 people per day on average test positive for the virus, which has killed at least 314,000 in the U.S. and upward of 1.7 million worldwide.
Nearly all the Pfizer and Moderna shots shipped so far and going out over the next few weeks are going to health care workers and residents of long-term care homes, based on the advice of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
There won’t be enough shots for the general population until spring, so doses will be rationed for at least the next several months. President-elect Joe Biden pledged earlier this month to have 100 million vaccine doses distributed in his first 100 days in office, and his surgeon general nominee said Sunday that it’s still a realistic goal.
But Vivek Murthy, speaking on NBC’S “Meet the Press,” said it’s more realistic to think it may be midsummer or early fall before coronavirus vaccines are available to the general population, rather than late spring. Murthy said Biden’s team is working toward having the shots available to lower-risk individuals by late spring but doing so requires “everything to go exactly on schedule.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s surgeon general, Jerome Adams, defended the administration’s handling of the Pfizer vaccine Sunday, a day after the Army general in charge of getting COVID-19 vaccines across the U.S. apologized Saturday for “miscommunication” with states over the number of doses to be delivered in the early stages of distribution. At least a dozen states reported that they would receive a smaller second shipment of the Pfizer vaccine than they had been told previously.
Gen. Gustave Perna told reporters in a telephone briefing that he made mistakes by citing numbers of doses that he believed would be ready.
But speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Adams said “the numbers are going to go up and down.”
“It absolutely was not poor planning,” he said. “There’s what we plan. There’s what we actually allocate. There’s what’s delivered, and then there’s what’s actually put in people’s arms.”
Adams, who is Black, said he understands that mistrust of the medical community and the vaccine among Blacks “comes from a real place,” the mistreatment of communities of color. He cited the decades-long Tuskegee experiment in Alabama, in which Black men with syphilis were not treated so the disease could be studied.