The amount could increase the vaccination for states by 25% and will be delivered within one or two days within the first week, Lori Tremmel Freeman said.
Vaccine administration has already increased, with 2.2 million more vaccinations than the previous day and about 70.5 million doses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But with variants spreading and threatening to once again drive down falling new business rates, officials are hoping to prepare for the spread with faster vaccinations.
“We had two vaccines and now it looks like we’re going to get three, and that means we can get more doses in our arms and we can try to get this terrible pandemic behind us,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National. Institutes of Health, said Wolf Blitzer of CNN.
New cases of coronavirus began to flatten after a gradual decline, and dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that these could be the ‘starting effects’ of more communicable variants that have an impact.
“CDC has sounded the alarm about the continued spread of variants in the United States,” she said during an information session in the White House on Friday.
Misconceptions that Johnson and Johnson vaccine are ‘second class’
The 22 members of the FDA’s advisory committee on vaccines and related biological products unanimously voted to recommend the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which according to one member was an ‘easy call’.
“It’s clearly coming past the bar and it’s nice to have a single dose of vaccination,” said dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said.
But some officials are concerned that the public misunderstands how good the vaccine is and sees it as ‘second class’ – a misconception that public health leaders will have to address.
“It’s difficult to make an apple-to-apple comparison between authorized vaccines, based on data collected before new variants are expected to be in circulation,” said Sarah Christopherson, policy advisory director at the National Women’s Health Network. said.
Although the Johnson and Johnson vaccine appears to have a lower efficacy rate than its previous counterparts, this does not make it a worse option, as the latest appears to protect against some of the virus variants, another committee member said. .
“One dose will keep you out of the hospital, keep you out of the intensive care unit and out of the morgue,” said Dr. Paul Offit told Wolf Blitzer of CNN.
Several public health experts told Congress on Friday that people who make the Johnson & Johnson vaccine available should get it.
“If I have a J&J vaccine available today and a Modern vaccine available tomorrow, I would love to take the J&J today. I do not feel I will have to wait. They are all great vaccines for the things we care about. , “The dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said during a hearing on the subcommittee of House Ways and Means Health.
Not the time to change doses
There is also promising news for the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine.
Only one dose can elicit a strong enough immune response in people who have already had Covid-19 to protect it from future infection, according to two new articles published Thursday in The Lancet magazine.
The vaccine is currently being administered in two doses, 21 days apart. The first dose makes the immune system primary and the second dose strengthens it against Covid-19.
Some officials have suggested that the administration of first doses be prioritized in order to increase the immune response in as many people as possible.
But with emerging variants, this is not the time to change the two-dose schedule for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association Friday.
“The vaccines have been studied and approved, approved, recommended as a two-dose schedule. Our programs are based on that. We communicated it to the public,” she said. “I just think there is not enough science yet to tell us that this is a moment to what we know to be 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.