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An advisory group’s recommendation will mean millions more Americans can be inoculated, extending protection against Covid beyond major urban areas into rural and suburban regions. The coronavirus vaccine made by Moderna moved closer to authorization on Thursday, a significant step that would expand the reach of the nation’s vaccination campaign to rural areas and many more hospitals. As the nation buckled from uncontrolled spread of the disease, with 3,611 deaths on Wednesday setting yet another horrific record, a panel of independent experts recommended,by a vote of 20 in favor and one abstention, that the Food and Drug Administration authorize the Moderna vaccine for emergency use. The formal decision, expected on Friday, would clear the way for some 5.9 million doses to be shipped around the country starting this weekend. Moderna would be the second company allowed to begin inoculating the public, giving millions more Americans access to desperately needed vaccine. The first, made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, received authorization last week. The Moderna vaccine can be distributed more widely because it can be stored at normal freezer temperatures and, unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, does not require ultracold storage. It also comes in much smaller batches, making it easier for hospitals in less populated areas to use quickly. “Moderna can go to more places,” Dr. Mandy Cohen, North Carolina’s secretary of health and human services, said this week. “We hope to be in all 100 counties with some amount of vaccine — small allocations at first — by the end of next week, assuming Moderna gets approved this week and we get our allocations delivered over the course of next week.”
The two vaccines, and an ambitious rollout by the federal government, states and businesses to deploy them, are the first signs of hope for an end to the pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 Americans, closed schools and businesses and left people afraid to go near friends, neighbors and relatives, especially at the height of the holiday season. Moderna developed its vaccine in collaboration with scientists from the National Institutes of Health. A second vaccine couldn’t come soon enough. State health officials complained this week after they learned the second shipment of the Pfizer vaccine would be smaller than the first one, prompting questions about whether the federal government would meet its goal of giving 20 million people an initial dose of the two-shot vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna before the end of the year. The smaller shipment, which appeared to be the result of a scheduling hiccup, ignited tensions between Pfizer and the federal government, who are negotiating over how many vaccine doses Pfizer will sell to the United States in the first half of next year. The vaccines are in short supply, and the initial batches are being given to people at high risk of infection or serious illness: frontline health care workers and the residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. On Saturday, an independent panel of experts will decide whether to recommend that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allow distribution of the Moderna vaccine. And on Sunday, the same panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, will decide which “priority group” should be next in line for the vaccine....
