Covid-19 Live Updates: The C.D.C. Recommends Nursing Homes and Health Workers Get Vaccines First
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The United States and Britain are racing to approve a vaccine. In the U.S., more school districts have begun to prioritize elementary students for in-person learning, a policy already in place in much of Europe.
RIGHT NOWThe White House summons the head of the F.D.A. to explain why the Pfizer vaccine has not received approval.
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Long-term care residents and health workers should get vaccine first, C.D.C. panel says.
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Long-term care residents and health workers should get vaccine first, C.D.C. panel says.
A rally of striking healthcare workers in Chicago last month. states and health systems must decide which of the nation’s 21 million health care workers should qualify to receive the first vaccine doses.
A rally of striking healthcare workers in Chicago last month. states and health systems must decide which of the nation’s 21 million health care workers should qualify to receive the first vaccine doses.Credit...Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated Press
An independent panel advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted Tuesday to recommend that residents and employees of nursing homes and similar facilities be the first people in the United States to receive coronavirus vaccines, along with health care workers who are especially at risk of being exposed to the virus.
The panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, voted 13 to 1 during an emergency meeting to make the recommendation. The director of the C.D.C., Dr. Robert R. Redfield, is expected to decide by Wednesday whether to accept it as the agency’s formal guidance to states as they prepare to start giving people the shots as soon as two weeks from now.
“We are acting none too soon,” said Dr. Beth Bell, a panel member and global health expert at the University of Washington, noting that Covid-19 would kill about 120 Americans during the meeting alone.
States are not required to follow the panel’s recommendations, but they usually do. The final decision will rest with governors, who are consulting with their top health officials as they complete distribution plans.
The new recommendation is the first of several expected from the panel over the coming weeks, as vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna go through the federal approval process, on the thorny question of which Americans should be at the front of the long line to get vaccinated while supply is still scarce. The panel described it as an interim recommendation that could change as more is learned about how well the vaccines work in different age groups and how well the manufacturers keep up with demand.
The roughly three million people living in long-term care and those who care for them are a relatively clear target; 39 percent of deaths from the coronavirus have occurred in such facilities, according to an analysis by The New York Times. But states and health systems will ultimately have to decide which of the nation’s 21 million health care workers should qualify to receive the first doses, as there won’t be enough at first for everyone.
Pfizer and Moderna have estimated that they will have enough to vaccinate, at most, 22.5 million Americans by year’s end, with the required two doses, a few weeks apart. The C.D.C. will apportion the supply among the states, with the initial allocation proportional to the size of each state’s adult population.
The only member of the committee to vote against the recommendation was Dr. Helen Talbot, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, who expressed discomfort with putting long-term-care residents in the first priority group because the vaccines’ safety had not been studied in that particular population. “We enter this realm of ‘we hope it works and we hope it’s safe,’ and that concerns me on many levels,” she said before the vote.
But most panel members who offered opinions said they thought the high death rate among that group made it imperative to include it.
Dr. José Romero, the chairman of the panel, said that he felt strongly that its process had adhered to its core principles: “maximizing benefit and minimizing harm,” promoting justice and addressing health inequities. Dr. Bell, the co-chair, acknowledged that all of the members would have liked more data from clinical trials but said that because of the pandemic emergency, “we need to act.”
Also Tuesday, C.D.C. officials moved to decrease the quarantine time for people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus, according to a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly. The move had been expected and encouraged by Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the White House coronavirus task force.
At a task force meeting on Tuesday afternoon, C.D.C. officials said they would reduce the guidance from 14 days to seven days for patients who have been exposed to the virus but who get a negative test, and to 10 days for people who do not get a test.
If adopted, the more relaxed guidance could lead to some infections being missed. Studies have found that the median incubation period for the virus is five days. A significant majority of people — 97.5 percent of those exposed to the virus — develop symptoms by the 12th day after infection.
A spokeswoman for the C.D.C. declined to comment on the change last week, saying only that the agency “is always reviewing its guidance and recommendations in the light of new understandings of the virus that causes Covid-19,” and that the change will be announced “when appropriate.”
— Abby Goodnough, Maggie Haberman and Roni Caryn Rabin
VACCINE DISTRIBUTIONThe C.D.C. director will decide by Wednesday whether to accept the recommendation.
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The U.S. and Britain race to authorize Covid-19 vaccines.
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Coronavirus Vaccine Could Be Ready in a Few Weeks, Says Johnson
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, during a visit to the pharmaceutical company Wockhardt, said “if we’re lucky” a coronavirus vaccine could be available for distribution within weeks, but stressed that some restrictions will still be necessary to keep the pandemic under control.
I’m here at Wockhardt, who are going to be making, we hope, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. And they have incredible capacity here to make up to 350 million doses a year. And, you know, this could — if we’re lucky, if everything goes right — this could be available just in a few weeks. What we need now is the approvals. No vaccine has yet got — this must be stressed — no vaccine has yet got M.H.R.A. approval. But we’re obviously hoping that both the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will get approved in the course of the next few days and weeks. We can’t afford to take our foot off the throat of the beast, to take our foot off the gas. We can’t afford to let it out of control again. So the tiering system is tough, but it’s designed to be tough and to keep it under control. I particularly understand the frustration of the hospitality sector that has borne so much, and been through so much in the last few months. And we will do everything we can, as we have been doing, to protect and to encourage that sector throughout the weeks and months ahead.
1:20
Coronavirus Vaccine Could Be Ready in a Few Weeks, Says Johnson
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, during a visit to the pharmaceutical company Wockhardt, said “if we’re lucky” a coronavirus vaccine could be available for distribution within weeks, but stressed that some restrictions will still be necessary to keep the pandemic under control.CreditCredit...Pool photo by Paul Ellis
The race to be the first nation to authorize a rigorously tested Covid-19 vaccine is intensifying.
British regulators are considering two vaccines for emergency approval: one developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, and another by Pfizer and BioNTech. Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited a vaccine manufacturing facility in Wales on Monday, boasting that “if we’re lucky, if everything goes, right, this could be available just in a few weeks.”
“This could, and I stress could, really be the salvation for humanity, these vaccines,” Mr. Johnson said.
Across the Atlantic, Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, summoned the F.D.A. commissioner, Stephen Hahn, to the White House on Tuesday morning to explain why regulators have not yet approved the emergency use of the vaccine developed by Pfizer, according to people familiar with the situation.
One official said Mr. Meadows was concerned that the British government may approve emergency use of a coronavirus vaccine before American regulators act, potentially embarrassing the Trump administration. Mr. Trump and Mr. Meadows have pressured the F.D.A. for months to speed up the development and approval of a vaccine, and allies of Dr. Hahn are worried that he could be fired if he fails to satisfy the White House demands.
On Tuesday, the White House said that Mr. Trump will host a “Covid-19 Vaccine Summit” next week, two days before a panel of outside advisers to the F.D.A. meets to decide whether the agency should grant emergency approval to the Pfizer vaccine. Vice President Mike Pence, the head of the White House coronavirus task force, will also attend the meeting with private sector executives and governors.
The global race to develop a vaccine is poised to shatter records for time to market. Around the world, researchers are testing 57 vaccines in clinical trials, and nearly 100 others are being tested in animals or cells. China and Russia have approved vaccines without waiting for the results of late-stage trials, known as Phase 3, which experts say raises serious risks.
Britain and the United States vet vaccine candidates differently: American regulators pore over raw data from vaccine makers to validate their results, while regulators in Britain and elsewhere in Europe lean more heavily on companies’ own analyses.
The European Union is also set to conduct its own review of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine. The companies announced on Tuesday that they had submitted their final application to the bloc’s health authorities. Moderna announced on Monday that it had also applied for approval for the European market and in the United States.
But creating a vaccine is only the first step in what will be a gargantuan feat of logistics: injecting enough people around the world to stop a pandemic in which more than 63 million people have been infected and 1.4 million have died. The United States, Britain and other rich countries have bought massive quantities of doses, but will still have to figure out how to ship, store and distribute them.
The Pfizer vaccine brings particular challenges: It must be stored in an ultracold freezer. That quandary already appeared to be affecting distribution plans in Britain. Nursing-home residents were supposed to be Britain’s top priority under an advisory committee’s plans, but a limit on how many times officials believe the Pfizer vaccine can be moved before it loses effectiveness likely means that National Health Service staff members will receive the shots first.
In the United States, states largely devise plans for vaccine distribution, but are likely to follow recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An advisory committee was meeting on Tuesday to discuss those.
Governments and health care organizations must also figure out how to overcome mistrust and concern about the vaccine’s safety. On Monday, the head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Francesco Rocca, warned that misinformation and distrust could torpedo vaccination campaigns.
“To beat this pandemic, we also have to defeat the parallel pandemic of distrust,” he said.
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