Biden’s efforts to defeat the pandemic are at a critical point. The number of new cases has started to flatten and even drop in some areas, and millions more vaccine doses are expected to be available within a few weeks. But the news that the more transmissible variants have reached the U.S. reduces the government’s margin for error, making it potentially more difficult to continue reducing the number of new infections and to draw resources away from the president’s goal of hundreds of millions To vaccinate Americans in the summer.
“We need better genetic monitoring of all the variants out there … but you can not snap your fingers and get it,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethics expert at the University of Pennsylvania, who transition in Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, said. . Manufacturers must also develop vaccines that can protect against multiple strains – just like flu shots – and medicines that can be easily administered to treat the virus, he added.
It is, moreover, the urgent need to vaccinate a large part of the country. Biden’s team “Push already as hard as they can, but you have to push as hard as possible to get as many people vaccinated as possible,” Emanuel said.
In some respects, the current situation seems to be in March 2020, when the US was dangerously in arrears to monitor the virus’ movements and was almost entirely dependent on other basic public health measures to limit its reach. Although there are two vaccines available in the US and more in development, officials are looking for ways to buy time and protect the already protracted healthcare systems while increasing their battle plans for pandemic, in their slower than expected implementation.
‘You’re going to hear me say it a lot, so here it is: wear masks. Stay six feet apart. Avoid crowds and poorly ventilated areas. This is also not the time to travel, ‘CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at an information session in the White House on Friday before highlighting the agency’s “dramatically” extensive efforts to oversee and test the past ten days. expand, describe – including partnerships with test companies and research laboratories across the country.
But even with the increased effort, “We need to treat each case as if it is currently a variant in this pandemic,” Walensky said.
The strains that have emerged from South Africa, Brazil and the United Kingdom are a huge challenge, said Michael Osterholm, an expert on infectious infectious disease from the University of Minnesota, who also advised Biden during the transition about the pandemic. “This is for me one of the most humble moments in my 45-year scientific career. I’m sure I know less about SARS-CoV-2 today than I did six months ago. The more I learn, the less I know , “he said.
Each new infection gives the virus a chance to mutate; Over time, small mutations can converge in ways that alter the behavior of the virus, giving rise to additional variants.
The CDC partnered with commercial laboratories and universities earlier this month to track at least 6,000 samples a week, a fraction of what, according to testing experts, is needed to determine the full extent of the spread of the virus and which strains are present. to understand. The U.S. needs to analyze 10,000 positive test specimens a day to get an image, Illumina giant Phil Febbo, chief medical officer, said in early January.
‘We’re doing a bit of sequencing and working with the CDC as well. “CDC has expanded its capacity, so our state laboratory is very much connected to the network of state laboratories that work with CDC,” said Jinlene Cha, acting deputy secretary of public health services for the Maryland Department of Health.
The emerging variants have not shifted the state’s immunization goals, Cha said. “We have not yet made any specific changes to our overall strategy: the goal is to get just as many vaccinations and vaccinate as many people as we can, and prioritize those at greatest risk.”
Meanwhile, federal health officials are appealing to people to wear religious masks. But only 37 states currently have mask rules.
The variants also encouraged vaccine developers to start working on booster shots to increase protection against the latest strains. Moderna has already started human trials ‘out of an abundance of caution’, while others, including Pfizer, say they are investigating the impact the tribes have on their shots.
FDA’s top vaccine regulator, Peter Marks, said on Friday that the agency was working on guidelines to quickly review current Covid-19 vaccines and evaluate the safety and efficacy of the adaptations in light of new virus variants.
The agency is working “with industry partners to put together a playbook for what it would look like if we had to switch to a different order,” Marks said during an event held by the American Medical Association on Friday. vaccines are likely to be “fairly streamlined” compared to their initial development and may involve clinical trials with only a few hundred people.
A manager of J&J argued during a call with investors on Friday morning that the company’s data reflects how the pandemic has developed since last autumn, when Pfizer and Moderna published their Phase III trial results. “Because there are a large number of these variants roaming around, you really can’t compare our 72 percent in the United States to a 94 percent done at any other time,” said Mathai Mammen, head of research and development of J & J’s pharmaceutical arm, said. , Janssen.
The J&J results reflect the difficult new reality with which the country’s pandemic is responding.
“This is a wake-up call for all of us,” top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said in a White House press release on Friday, adding that the government and vaccine manufacturers need to be ‘quick’ to adjust shots to to protect against different strains. .
That quick action is not only limited to the construction of an altered vaccine, but also to switching the production line, eliminating the updated shots, making it powerful and distributing it to millions. This could be a Herculean task in addition to the already complicated explosion of the vaccine nationwide.
Congress funding for these efforts will be critical in the next emergency relief package, White House senior adviser Andy Slavitt told reporters. “We want to turbo-charge our efforts to turbo-sequencing, which I think should be a shared dual perspective, we can do that,” he said at the White House briefing. “What we need is for Congress to pass the US bailout plan quickly.”
Meanwhile, public health measures with common sense are critical. Osterholm predicts an increase in the United States over the next six to 14 weeks, driven by the more transmissible strains and a general pandemic fatigue that loosens health measures at the worst possible time. “We can really pump brakes after we turn the car around the tree,” he said.
Rachel Roubein, David Lim and Brianna Ehley contributed to this report.