An advisory panel from Centers for Disease Control on Sunday recommended that the next two groups of Americans who will receive the COVID-19 vaccine should be 75 and older and front-line workers – including police, firefighters, teachers, and grocers.
The first people to already receive the vaccine, known as stage 1A, are health care providers and long-term residents of health care facilities, such as nursing homes. Sunday’s recommendations set out who the advisory panel said should be prioritized in the next two stages of vaccine rollout. The CDC panel recommended that Stage 1B should include Americans 75 and older and frontline workers. After that, Phase 1C should apply to Americans ages 65-74, people ages 16-64 with high-risk medical conditions, and other essential workers, the CDC confirmed to CBS News Sunday.
The CDC defines key frontline workers as “workers who are in industries essential to the functioning of society and are at significantly higher risk of being exposed to SARS-CoV-2.” This group includes first responders, correction workers, US Postal Service workers, those who work in education, public transportation workers, supermarket workers, and those who work in manufacturing, food, and agriculture. About 30 million Americans fall in this group, according to the CDC.
Other key workers – who would fall into Stage 1C if the CDC panel recommendations were followed – include those working in food service, transportation and logistics, finance, energy, media, construction, IT and communications, public safety and the legal sector. This group includes approximately 57 million people.
The first Americans received the COVID-19 vaccine on December 14. The CDC said on Sunday that more than 500,000 doses have been administered out of the nearly 3 million doses of the vaccine distributed. The doses distributed and administered so far are the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
The Food and Drug Administration approved a second vaccine, this one manufactured by Moderna, for distribution on Friday, with the first batches of the vaccine ready to be shipped on Sunday.
Howard Zucker, New York’s health commissioner, said on Sunday that the state, most affected at the start of the pandemic, had received all batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine it expected to receive. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo warned last week that the vaccine is the “light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a long tunnel.”