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The US president said the country was on track to have enough vaccines for every adult in the country by the end of May. ‘When we came into office, the prior administration had contracted for not nearly enough vaccine to cover adults in America. We rectified that’
Biden: US ‘on track’ to have enough vaccines for all adults by May More
With less than 7% of Texans fully vaccinated and another Covid-19 surge potentially imminent, Texas is flinging open businesses to full capacity while simultaneously ending its highly politicized mask mandate, the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, announced on Tuesday.“It is now time to open Texas 100%,” a maskless Abbott declared to cheers at a crowded restaurant in the city of Lubbock.When Abbott’s policy changes go into effect next week, Texas will be the most populous state in the country that does not require residents to wear masks. Restaurants and other businesses can choose to maintain their own mask policies, but without government backing to do so.“We had a chance maybe by the end of the summer of getting a handle on this pandemic. This governor is just going to throw all of that out and put us back to the stone ages,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic party. “This is crazy.”Other states and cities have likewise started rolling back precautions. In Mississippi – another Republican stronghold – Governor Tate Reeves also announced on Tuesday that the state was lifting rules for businesses and doing away with county mask mandates.In other states and cities, including Michigan, Louisiana, and the city of San Francisco, California, officials are also lifting some restrictions, albeit not with the sweeping approach of Mississippi or Texas.Abbott’s announcement – which comes after about 43,000 Texans have died from the virus, and while many Texans are still ineligible for the vaccine – sparked immediate and vehement backlash, from Democratic mayors to workers’ advocates infuriated that Texans of color will once again be the hardest hit.“I think this is a slap in the face of working people, especially frontline workers, who have been risking their lives,” said Emily Timm, the co-executive director of Workers Defense Action Fund.Local leaders in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin – Texas’s biggest cities – called on Abbott “not to create any ambiguity or uncertainty about the importance of wearing a mask by changing the rules at this time”, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, said in a statement.“We as a state should be guided by science and data, which says we should keep the mask mandate. Too much is at stake to compromise the positive outcomes we have seen with over-confidence,” Adler said.The policy changes also follow a devastating winter storm that pummeled Texas mere weeks ago, in a crisis made worse because of the state’s bungled emergency management.Some critics say Abbott is using this moment to distract from that catastrophic failure, while also playing politics with lives to curry favor with a far-right Republican base that turned against him after he implemented coronavirus restrictions last summer.“He’s made a decision based upon politics,” Hinojosa said.As most meaningful coronavirus-related restrictions disappear from Texas, the state is simultaneously staring down what could easily be a series of super-spreader events over spring break.South Texas beach towns in Corpus Christi and the already hard-hit Rio Grande Valley have long been popular destinations among party-going college students from around the country, and as tourists pack into bars and restaurants, none of them will have to wear masks or socially distance.“You think we had a horrible spike on Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July, and during the holidays?” Hinojosa said. “The spike that this state will experience in coronavirus cases will be extremely high – and will cause many, many more deaths than any responsible governor should have allowed.” More
Dr Rochelle Walensky, the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned on Monday that a recent increase in coronavirus cases indicated a “fourth surge” could occur before a majority of the US is vaccinated.“At this level of cases, with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” Walensky said, during a White House briefing.“Now is not the time to relax the critical safeguards that we know can stop the spread of Covid-19 in our communities, not when we are so close. We have the ability to stop a potential fourth surge of cases in this country.”According to Johns Hopkins University, the US has recorded more than 28.5m Covid-19 cases and nearly 513,000 deaths. Daily case numbers fell steeply after a peak in January but have started to increase again.Jeff Zients, coordinator of the White House coronavirus response team, said the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine which was approved for use on Saturday would start to be delivered “as early as tomorrow”.According to Zients, Johnson & Johnson is ready to distribute 3.9m doses over the coming days, adding to a vaccine stockpile already supplied by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which both developed two-shot vaccines.But he added: “J&J has indicated that the supply will be limited for the next couple of weeks.”Johnson & Johnson is expected to deliver 16m additional doses by the end of March, but the White House coronavirus response team has warned governors that those deliveries will occur “predominantly in the back half of the month”.Zients assured Americans that the federal government is ready to deliver the vaccine as soon as doses become available, saying: “We’ve done the planning. We have the distribution channels in place.”He also announced that the US distributed an average of 1.7m doses a day over the past week. Vaccine distribution had rebounded after a winter storm affected deliveries across the central US, he said.According to Bloomberg, about 2.4m vaccine doses were administered in the US on Sunday.Also on Monday, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, said some people who have Covid “may not be on a path to get better in a few months and this could be something that becomes a chronic illness”.“When you consider we know 28 million people in the United States have had Covid,” Collins told NBC Nightly News, “if even 1% of them have chronic, long-term consequences, that’s a whole lot of people. And we need to find out everything we can about how to help them.”Collins also said scientists had not expected Covid-19 to lead to long-term illness.“There’s really no precedent I know of,” he said. More
The battle against Covid-19 took a major step forward on Friday as the US moved closer to distributing its first one-shot Covid-19 vaccine, after an independent expert advisory panel recommended drug regulators authorize the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for emergency use.The authorization would be a significant boost to the Biden administration’s vaccination plans, making Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine the third available to the public. Janssen, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine subsidiary, told a congressional hearing this week that it expects to deliver 20m doses by March and a total of 100m doses before the end of June.The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, along with those from Pfizer and Moderna, should provide the US with more than enough supply to vaccinate every vaccine-eligible person.“We’re still in the midst of this deadly pandemic,” said Dr Archana Chatterjee, a voting member of the panel and an infectious disease pediatrician at Chicago Medical School, as she explained her vote in favor of recommending the vaccine. “There is a shortage of vaccines that are currently authorized, and I think authorization of this vaccine will help meet the needs at the moment.”While regulators at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) do not always take the advice of their advisory panels, the agency is expected to authorize the vaccine for emergency use.“We urgently need more vaccines [authorized] to protect the millions of Americans who remain at risk” of Covid-19 infection, said Dr Greg Poland, the editor-in-chief of the medical journal Vaccine and leader of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic.“Today, we have seen clear and compelling evidence that the Janssen vaccine candidate is well tolerated, has an acceptable safety profile and most importantly is highly efficacious against Covid-19,” he said. “To me, it is clear that the known benefits vastly outweigh the known risks.”The recommendation comes soon after the US marks 500,000 deaths from Covid-19, a toll that comes as cases decline in the US and across many countries worldwide. More than 28 million Americans have been infected by Covid-19.“We are seeing positive trends in terms of declining cases,” said Dr Adam MacNeil, a member of the Covid-19 epidemiology taskforce with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He later added: “We are certainly not out of the woods yet.”Importantly, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine would also be the easiest to distribute. Unlike vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which require sub-zero storage, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine can be stored at common refrigerator temperatures for up to three months. When frozen it has a shelf life of three years.The convenience of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine comes with caveats. The company’s clinical trials were the first to show the potential impacts of Covid-19 variants, or evolutionary changes in the virus.The vaccine was found to 85% effective at preventing severe disease and to provide complete protection against Covid-19-related hospitalization and death after 28 days. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was found to be 72% effective in clinical trials in the US, but only 57% effective in South Africa, where a variant called B1351 originated.However, vaccination remains a powerful weapon, even with threats posed by variants. “Even with decreased effectiveness, vaccination may still provide partial protection against variants,” said MacNeil. Like the Moderna vaccine, Johnson & Johnson’s product will only be available to people 18 and older. Pfizer’s vaccine is available to teenagers older than 16. Also, as with other vaccines, researchers are uncertain how long the vaccine protects against Covid-19, and whether it reduces asymptomatic transmission of the virus, although studies are promising.Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine uses different technology from the two vaccines currently available in the US. The new vaccine uses “viral vector” technology, which introduces the body to the genetic code for the spike protein covering the outside of the coronavirus. This code is transmitted by a second, weakened virus called an adenovirus.Immunity is provoked when the body’s immune system then recognizes the coronavirus by this key structure. Vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna also prompt the body to recognize spike proteins on the outside of the coronavirus, but deliver the genetic code through lipid nanoparticles, or tiny molecules of fatty acids.Because scientists are still researching the degree to which any of the authorized vaccines prevent people from spreading Covid-19 to other people, public health authorities recommend people continue to social distance and wear masks after being vaccinated. In theory, a vaccinated person could still spread the SARS-CoV-2 virus, even if they do not experience any symptoms of the disease Covid-19.Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines and the doses already scheduled to be delivered by Moderna and Pfizer, the makers of the two vaccines currently authorized in the US, mean there could be enough supply to vaccinate 400 million people by July. Roughly 267 million people in the US are eligible for a vaccine.This ease of storage and one-dose regime is likely to increase pressure on the US government to pledge doses to low- and middle-income countries, which often lack the cold chain infrastructure needed to distribute the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. Currently, dozens of low- and middle-income countries do not expect to begin broadly distributing vaccine doses until 2022.Activists, many of whom also worked to expand access to Aids medications, have described this as “vaccine apartheid”, and a threat to the “project of global population immunity”. More
