About Covid-19 again, According to Commissioner Stephen Hahn, the study comes after the FDA said it told Moderna that it would quickly work to finalize and issue emergency use authorization for its candidate.
A panel of external FDA advisors unanimously supported the emergency use of the Moderna vaccine candidate on Thursday, virtually guaranteeing a second choice for a pandemic-ravaged nation to defend against Covid-19.
The influx of Covid-19 is pushing US hospitals to the brink:
In the meantime, as the United States pressed ahead with its immunization rollout on Thursday, an unrelenting coronavirus surge has driven besieged hospitals further to the brink.
For a 19th straight day, Covid-19 hospitalizations soared to record heights, with almost 113,000 patients with coronavirus counted in US medical facilities nationwide on Wednesday, while 3,580 more died, the most in a single day.
To date, the epidemic has claimed almost 308,000 lives in the United States, and this winter, when intensive care units (ICUs) filled up and hospital beds overflowed into hallways, health professionals have warned of a worsening crisis.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said at a briefing on Thursday, adding that the country’s second-largest city had completely depleted its ICU capacity, “We expect to have more dead bodies than we have rooms for them.”
Some health professionals are afraid of being vaccinated:
On Sunday, the initial 2.9 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine started shipping and were still making their way to hospitals around the nation and into the arms of physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals from the frontline.
Some of the first shots were also aimed at long-term care facilities for patients and workers. Certain primary staff, senior citizens, and people with chronic health problems will receive subsequent vaccine rounds.
Vaccines can take several months to be readily accessible on-demand to the public, and opinion polls have shown many Americans reluctant to get inoculated.
Some are typically distrustful of immunizations, and some are suspicious of the extraordinary pace at which the first vaccines were produced and rolled out, 11 months after the first reported Covid-19 cases in the United States.
Public health officials have attempted to convince Americans that the vaccines are both safe and extremely effective for disease prevention.
But even within pockets of healthcare workers identified as first in line for inoculation, ambivalence has arisen.
“There are those on the fence. Many believe we need to get it done. It’s split in the middle,” said Diego Montes Lopez, 28, a Martin Luther King Jr. phlebotomist. South Los Angeles Community Hospital, said of co-workers after being injected on their own.
