Many Developments in Covid Vaccination Efforts, Mostly Positive
Despite the sad benchmark of half a million Americans dead from Covid-19, many developments in the war against Covid-19 are happening daily with most being positive.
The CDC is reporting that more than 16 million doses of the two approved vaccines have been delivered since Sunday, probably clearing that backlog from last week’s terrible weather. More than 91.6 million have been delivered overall.
Johnson and Johnson is expected to get emergency approval to begin shipping its single dose vaccine tomorrow or this weekend. It has three to four million shots ready to go.
Pfizer has received the FDA’s approval to relax the requirement that its vaccine be kept at ultralow temperatures making it easier to ship and giving the vaccine less chance of being discarded because it is thought to be spoiled.
www.msn.com/…CNBC’s Meg Tirrell reports the FDA has allowed Pfizer to store its Covid vaccines at normal freezer temperatures for two weeks. This will allow for easier storage for Pfizer vaccines, which previously had to be stored in ultra-cold conditions.
Novavax, another US company testing a vaccine that might be approved in a month or two, reported good results on its trials.
www.msn.com/…In late January, Novavax shared positive results from its phase 3 clinical trials in the U.K. The vaccine development company announced in a press release that its two-dose vaccine is almost 90% effective against preventing symptomatic forms of COVID-19. Worth noting: The vaccine was tested when the highly infectious U.K. variant (B.1.1.7) was widely circulating.
The Novavax vaccine wasn’t highly effective against every coronavirus variant, though. The company announced that its vaccine was 60% effective at preventing mild, moderate, and severe COVID-19 in study participants in South Africa. The reason is likely due to the circulation of the region’s highly infectious variant (B.1.351), says infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
www.msn.com/…One negative development is the continuing emergence and spread of new variants of Covid-19 which may be more infectious or vaccine resistant than the original. Both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are working on the usefulness of having a third booster shot to deal with these new types of Covid.
There is some new evidence that getting a flu short reduces one’s likelihood of getting Covid.
www.ajmc.com/…Patients who have received an influenza vaccine were found to have 24% lower odds of testing positive for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), according to a recent study published in the American Journal of Infection Control.
Additionally, patients who were vaccinated against influenza and tested positive for COVID-19 were more likely to have better clinical outcomes than those who were not vaccinated.
Efforts continue to bring vaccinations to underserved communities. Local pharmacies should be getting increasing numbers of doses.
www.msn.com/…“There is a lot of untapped capacity out there, ” said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at New York University, who advised the Biden transition. “I think there is huge potential to scale up through the retail pharmacies. It has been much more focused until now, but once supply opens up they will be targeting those most-at-risk populations, but also scaling up more broadly.”
Covid-19 Vaccinations in US Time Doses Delivered Total Shots 1st Shot % of Pop 2nd Shot % of Pop 2/24 91,673,010 68,274,117 46,074,392 13.9% 21,555,117 6.5% 2/23 88,669,035 66,464,947 45,237,143 13.6% 20,607,261 6.2% 2/22 82,114,370 65,032,083 44,544,969 13.4% 2/21 75,205,940 64,177,474 44,138,118 19,438,495 2/20 75,204,965 63,090,634 43,628,092 18,865,319 1/20 16.5 million 12/31 2.8 million 12/18 12/14
Moderna Pfizer
approved approved
(The CDC allows a 3-day reporting window.)
