That amount could increase the Covid-19 vaccination for states by 25% and deliver it within one or two days in the first week, said National Association of County and City Health Officials chief executive officer Lori Tremmel Freeman.
Vaccine delivery has already increased, with 2.2 million more vaccinations reported Friday than the day before and a total of about 70.5 million doses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But with variants spreading and threatening to ship once falling rates for new cases skyrocket again, officials hope to get ahead of the spread with faster vaccinations.
“We’ve had two vaccines and it looks like we’re getting three and that means we can get more doses in the arms and try to get this terrible pandemic behind us,” said Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National. Institutes of Health, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told CNN.
New cases of coronavirus are starting to level off after a steady decline, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that these could be the “onset effects” of more communicable variants having an impact.
“The CDC has pulled the alarm over the continued spread of variants in the United States,” she said during a White House briefing on Friday.
Misconceptions that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is ‘second-rate’
The 22 members of the FDA’s Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biologics voted unanimously to recommend the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which one member said was an “easy call.”
“It’s clearly going well above the bar and it’s nice to have a single dose vaccine,” says Dr. Eric Rubin, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and professor at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
But some officials are concerned that the public doesn’t understand how good the vaccine is, viewing it as “second-tier” – a misconception that public health leaders will have to address.
“It is difficult to make an apple-to-apple comparison between authorized vaccines based on data collected before new variants are believed to be widely circulating,” said Sarah Christopherson, the policy attorney director at the National. Women’s Health Network.
While the Johnson & Johnson vaccine appears to have lower efficacy than its previous counterparts, that doesn’t make it a worse option as the latest appears to offer protection against some of the virus variants, another member of the committee recommending the vaccine to recommend.
“One dose keeps you out of the hospital, keeps you out of intensive care, and keeps you out of the morgue,” said Dr. Paul Offit on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Several public health experts told Congress on Friday that people who made the Johnson & Johnson vaccine available should get it.
“If I had a J&J vaccine available today and a Moderna vaccine tomorrow, I would love to take the J&J vaccine today. I don’t feel like I should wait. They’re all great vaccines for things. what we care about., “Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told a hearing by the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee.
Not the time to change doses
There is also promising news for the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine.
According to two new articles published Thursday in the journal The Lancet, just one dose can elicit a strong enough immune response in people who have already had Covid-19 that it could protect against future infection.
The vaccine is currently administered in two doses, 21 days apart. The first dose boosts the immune system and the second boosts it to protect against Covid-19.
Some officials have suggested prioritizing the administration of the first doses in order to rapidly increase the immune response in as many people as possible.
But with emerging variants, now is not the time to change the two-dose schedule for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, said in a conversation with the CDC. Journal of the American Medical Association on Friday.
“The vaccines have been researched and approved, authorized, recommended as a two-dose schedule. Our programs are built on that. We have communicated that to the public,” she said. “I just don’t think there’s enough science left to tell us it’s a time to change something that we know is an effective regime.”
CNN’s Jacqueline Howard, Deidre McPhillips, Lauren Mascarenhas, Nicholas Neville, Maggie Fox, Jen Christensen, Jamie Gumbrecht and Virginia Langmaid contributed to this report.