Some 7.9 million additional vaccines against COVID-19, including 5.9 million doses from the Moderna laboratory, will be delivered in the United States from Monday, a government official announced on Sunday.
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Chief adviser of the Warp Speed ​​program, set up by the US government to develop and deliver vaccines against the coronavirus, Moncef Slaoui counted on the first injections of the Moderna vaccine on Monday morning.
The American Medicines Agency (FDA) announced late Friday that it had granted this American laboratory an emergency authorization, a week after having done the same with that of Pfizer and BioNTech.
Since the FDA granted Pfizer / BioNTech emergency clearance, some 2.9 million doses have been delivered in one week, according to General Gus Perna, operational manager of Operation Warp Speed.
Asked by the CNN channel, Moncef Slaoui apologized for the government, after Gus Perna on Saturday, for having had to reduce the quantity of vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech during the second wave of deliveries, which amounts to two million doses.
Several local elected officials were thus moved not to have been warned earlier of the reduction in the number of vaccines compared to what had been initially planned.
This reduction is only temporary and the US government still projects that 20 million people will be vaccinated by the end of the year or the first week of January.
The vaccine rollout comes as the spread of the virus continues to accelerate in the United States. Some 3,611 people died from COVID-19 on Wednesday, a new record.
As of Saturday, nearly 200,000 people have tested positive in the United States, bringing the total to nearly 18 million since the start of the pandemic, which has killed more than 316,000 people nationwide.
“It will get worse,” warned Moncef Slaoui, because of the gatherings for the end of the year celebrations.
Moncef Slaoui also indicated that the US government was closely following the spread of a new strain of coronavirus in the United Kingdom, while warning that it appeared “very unlikely” that it would prove resistant to vaccines.
On Sunday, the future public health administrator of Joe Biden’s government, the Dr Vivek Murthy told NBC that he expected the general public to be vaccinated [hors des populations à risque] occurs only in mid-summer or early fall.