“This is really an incredible achievement,” said Dr. Amanda Cohn, Executive Secretary of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, at a committee meeting on Sunday. “We hope they will continue to increase production and possibly have new products early next year.”
But as the US awaits distribution of vaccines to a wider audience, it faces the potential rise in winter holidays.
More than a million Americans passed airport security checkpoints on Friday and Saturday – a first since the pandemic began. Cases spiked after Thanksgiving trips and get-togethers, and experts warn that repeating the behavior over Christmas could result in a wave atop a wave.
Another such increase is something Tennessee cannot sustain, Governor Bill Lee said on Sunday.
“Tennesseans have two weapons that they must use in the next 30 days: collect only with your household and wear a mask,” said Lee.
Illinois is approaching 1 million cases
At a time of unprecedented spread of the coronavirus, three states have crossed the grim threshold of more than a million cases: California, Texas and Florida.
On Sunday, Illinois took one step closer to joining that list when it surpassed 900,000 cases since the start of the pandemic, the health department said in a press release.
New York, once the epicenter of the US pandemic, is hoping to soften a wave of its own. Long-term care facilities in the state will start receiving vaccines starting Monday, Gareth Rhodes, special adviser to the state department of financial services, said at a news conference on Friday.
Statewide, 618 long-term care facilities have signed up to allow workers with CFS and Walgreens to administer vaccines to residents and staff, Rhodes said.
New Jersey will administer its nursing home vaccines on Dec. 28, after government officials missed a federal deadline for registering their facilities, New Jersey Health Commissioner Judy Persichilli said.
“To start on the 21st, there was a 7th deadline for the input of all registered, skilled nursing facilities, long-term care facilities, assisted living facilities, of which we have about … over 650. missed by a day, ”she said, referring to the amount of information that needed to be entered.
Slaoui believes vaccines will still be effective after virus variation
While both the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine and the Moderna vaccine have shown efficacy rates of about 95% in clinical trials, there is growing concern as to whether the vaccines would work on new variants of the coronavirus – such as one spreading in the UK.
Top health officials say there is still a lot they don’t know about the variant, and to reduce its spread a a growing list of countries has blocked travel from the UK, including Canada, Argentina, Israel, Germany and France.
Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research are looking into the variant and expect to know in the coming days if there are any concerns that vaccines might not work against it.
But “so far I don’t think there is one variant that would be resistant to the vaccine”, sad Slaoui. “We can’t rule it out, but it’s not here now.”
He said the new coronavirus is prone to variance. But critical aspects of the virus, such as the spike protein involved in a vaccine, are very specific to the novel coronavirus and are unlikely to mutate much.
“Because the vaccines use antibodies to many different parts of the spike protein, the chances of all of them changing, I think are low,” Slaoui said.
CNN’s Virginia Langmaid, Raja Razek, Pete Muntean, Jacqueline Howard Melissa Alonso, Hollie Silverman, Naomi Thomas and Gisela Crespo contributed to this report.