British grandmother Margaret Keenan, 90, has become the first person in the world to receive a Pfizer vaccine after it has been clinically approved.
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A retired shop assistant, Keenan, who turns 91 next week, said it was the perfect birthday present because it meant she could finally be with her family for the next year. The second recipient was an 81-year-old British grandfather.
The UK was the first western country to start mass vaccinating against the coronavirus, prompting the US and the European Union to speed up vaccine approvals and seize “strategic supplies”. The US Food and Drug Administration has yet to give Pfizer the final green light, but Donald Trump took credit for the vaccine summit at the White House today.
White House Vaccine Summit
Trump said at the summit on Tuesday that the FDA is expected to approve Pfizer’s vaccine within days, followed by Modena’s, and that tens of millions of doses will be available this month. The order of priority for each state will be determined by the governor, and Trump has suggested priorities for the governor: senior citizens, emergency workers, health care workers.
Mr. Trump said everyone who wants to be vaccinated will get the vaccine. Just a few months ago, no one believed this would happen. Now, once a vaccine is available, COVID-19 will be over. “Today, we are in the midst of another medical miracle,” Trump said. “Even if you are not a Trump fan, people are saying, whether you like him or not, this is one of the great wonders of America, in modern medicine and other times!”
At the summit, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that would require vaccines to be given first to Americans, not to other countries. Trump has threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to force vaccine manufacturers to enforce executive orders if americans cannot be guaranteed access to the vaccine.
But it is well known that Pfizer is a multinational company that, although headquartered in New York, has COVID-19 production facilities in both the United States and Europe, including a plant in Belgium that is responsible for the final stages of the vaccine. America’s government has agreed to buy 100m doses of the vaccine from Pfizer, covering 50m people (one patient needs two injections).
Pfizer’s frozen storage warehouse in Belgium
Today, it emerged that Pfizer had repeatedly asked the Trump administration if it would buy more doses of the vaccine, but had been turned down. Now the Trump administration wants to limit Pfizer’s ability to distribute the vaccine to other countries. But officials privately explain that Pfizer was able to make a large supply of the vaccine at the time, when it was not known how effective it was and could not be bought blindly. And in addition to Pfizer, there is another Company, Modena, which is expected to be approved soon.
The New York Times pointed out that the UK was the first to approve a vaccine because of the way it and the US review vaccines. Rather than accept the vaccine makers’ findings, US regulators painstakingly re-analyzed the original trial data to verify the results and pore over documents said to number thousands of pages. Stephen Hahn, the FDA’s commissioner, boasts that his agency is “one of the few regulatory agencies in the world that actually looks at the raw data.”
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FDA documents released on Tuesday showed that Pfizer’s data on the COVID-19 vaccine met the guidelines for application for “emergency use authorization” and did not raise any new issues. Studies have shown that novel Coronavirus can be effectively prevented after seven days of two doses of vaccine, but there is not enough data to determine the safety of the vaccine in persons under 16 years of age, pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems.
Biden appoints medical team
At the same time as Mr. Trump was attending the White House vaccine summit, Mr. Biden was in Delaware, introducing seven key officials from his health team.
Current California Attorney General Patricia Becerra was nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services. The director of the Infectious diseases division at Massachusetts General Hospital, Richard Wallenski, was named director of the CDC. Former SURGEON General James Murthy will return to the post. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will serve as biden’s team’s chief medical adviser on COVID-19, while retaining his current position. Almost every health official has worked with Biden, and Biden said they will be fully prepared to deal with the outbreak on day one.
Biden also set three goals today for his first 100 days in office:
First, it would require Americans to wear masks within the first 100 days of his presidency, and would be mandatory in federal buildings and on public transportation.
Second, distribute at least 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine within the first 100 days of taking office;
Third, get students back to school, with money from Congress.
These three points may seem easy, but they are hard to implement. Mandatory masks would violate the most sacred “freedom” in the hearts of many Americans; Going back to school requires funding from Congress; There are logistical difficulties in distributing the vaccine. Pfizer’s vaccines need to be kept in crates on dry ice and kept below minus 70 degrees Celsius. Modena’s vaccine can be thawed, but stored in a regular refrigerator for 30 days.
Even if all logistical problems are overcome, wang’s non-emergency workers, non-medical workers, non-senior human rights and non-elderly people rank behind 268 million in the priorities set by the U.S. government.
In Washington, d.c., there are 560000 people ahead of wang: 59000 health workers, 4932 nurses, 12000 emergency workers, 161000 people with health risks, 7518 old man, 16000 core workers, 10000 teachers, 5239 homeless, 1521 prisoners, 127000 young people, 117000 children and 37000 other core staff, 124000 others.
And even when it comes time to get vaccinated, not all Americans are willing to get vaccinated. A new public opinion poll shows that some Americans remain skeptical about the COVID-19 vaccine after the FDA approved it.
Seventy-one percent of Democrats are likely to get vaccinated, compared with 52 percent of Republicans and even fewer independents, at 40 percent, according to OnePoll.
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Vaccines are partisan, too
Overall, only 55 percent of Americans said they would be willing to get a vaccine now if it were available. Of those, 43 percent of men would like to be vaccinated, while only 26 percent of women are “very likely” to get vaccinated. Thirty-four percent of women said they did not want to be vaccinated. “They want to see if there are any other side effects before deciding whether to get vaccinated,” said one person involved in the survey.
In other words, most Americans will still be at risk of COVID-19 until they are vaccinated. And the STATUS of COVID-19 in the United States is setting new records every day.
America’s health system is on the verge of collapse
The coVID-7 outbreak in the United States set a new record, with 192,299 new infections, 1,404 deaths, more than 100,000 hospitalizations and the collapse of the NATION’s health care system.
The COVID-19 outbreak has continued in the United States since the Thanksgiving holiday last month, with a daily death toll of 2,200, surpassing the 2,000 recorded in April, the peak of the epidemic. Last week alone, 15,658 Americans died from the new coronavirus, the highest death toll since April.
Hospitalization rates have been setting records every day since late October, and are now on the rise in 31 states compared with 14 days ago.
Last week, every state except Utah and Montana saw more deaths than the previous seven days. Dakota continues to record the highest number of deaths per 100,000 people in the country. Rhode Island is currently the worst-hit state, with an average of 110 infections per 100,000 people a week.
Rhode Island has set up two temporary hospitals to deal with the rising number of infected people, but Dr. Megan Benson, of brown University’s Center for Life And Digital Medicine, warns: “Even with a temporary hospital, you can’t save yourself without a respiratory doctor or nurse.”
Another hard-hit governor, Andrew Cuomo of New York, warned that hospital admissions in his state had climbed to the highest level since early June. More than 3,500 people have been hospitalized with COVID-19, nearly doubling in the past five months.
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The situation on the West Coast is equally grim: California has seen a 90 per cent increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations in the past two weeks, including a 67 per cent increase in intensive care alone. The number of California hospitalizations is expected to triple by Christmas. From mid-December, the number of beds in California’s intensive care units will be in short supply.
Following governor Newson’s late November curfew, the California Department of Public Health announced on December 5 that a curfew will be in place for at least three weeks across southern California and parts of central California.
The California Hospital Association says it will take three steps once the ICU reaches capacity: try to convert surgical beds to ICU beds; Transfer patients who may no longer need ICU care to a care center or other facility.
Renown Regional Medical Center, a Hospital in Nevada that has Renown for COVID-19 patients, opened two floors of temporary beds on Nov. 12 in an underground parking lot where it has treated 265 people.
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“Our frontline medical staff are going through things they could never have imagined,” said the medical center’s CEO. On Monday, the number of new infections in Nevada stood at 2,448, with four deaths.
I’ve been asked by friends back home why the health care system hasn’t collapsed in the United States because of the epidemic. Because as long as the patient is not seriously ill, do not need to be hospitalized, even do not go to the hospital. But the fear of a health system collapse has always been there, especially now. For the first time, the U.S. Department of Health this week integrated hospital capacity and bed use across the country to monitor stress at individual hospitals.
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The data collected hospital capacity reports from 2,200 counties in the United States, 126 of which were 90 percent full, mainly in Kentucky, Georgia, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Texas. At Memorial Hermann Hospital Sysytem, Texas, 250 beds plus 31 at the medical center were more than 90% full last week. Thanksgiving is just beginning to peak, and Christmas is coming up. The US has a very dark winter ahead before the COVID-19 vaccine really works.
The recent case of COVID-19 in Xiao Wang’s hometown of Chengdu made national news immediately, and the little friends in Chengdu were in a panic. Looking at the United States, Xiao Wang can’t help feeling…
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