Now that Americans are receiving the first vaccines for the coronavirus, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is encouraging employers to print stickers for their workers who have been inoculated.
The agency has released the designs of two stickers — one orange, one white — both of which say, “I got my COVID-19 vaccine!”
On Monday, New York City ICU nurse Sandra Lindsay became the nation’s first health care worker to receive the vaccine. Hundreds more hospitals around the country began dispensing COVID-19 shots to their workers in a rapid expansion of the U.S. vaccination drive Tuesday, while a second vaccine moved to the cusp of government authorization.
A day after the rollout of Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus shots, the Food and Drug Administration said its preliminary analysis confirmed the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine developed by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health. A panel of outside experts is expected to vote to recommend the formula on Thursday, with the FDA’s green light coming soon thereafter.
The Moderna vaccine uses the same technology as Pfizer-BioNTech’s and showed similarly strong protection against COVID-19 but is easier to handle because it does not need to be kept in the deep freeze at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit.
On Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the nation could achieve herd immunity against the coronavirus by “the end of the second quarter 2021,″ as vaccines are more widely deployed.
Depending on the “efficiency of the rollout,” Fauci said vaccines should be widely available to most Americans “sometime by the end of March, the beginning of April, that the normal healthy man and woman in the street who has no underlying conditions would likely get it.”
Fauci, who will continue as a central federal architect of the virus response in President-elect Joe Biden’s administration, said he believed most Americans who wanted the vaccine could probably get it by later March or early April.
Fauci hopes by late spring or early summer, the U.S. will attain “that umbrella of herd immunity.”
“By the time we get to the fall, we can start approaching some degree of relief where the level of infection will be so low in society we can start essentially approaching some form of normality,” he said.
Following another initial set of deliveries Wednesday, officials with the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed said they will begin moving 580 more shipments through the weekend.
“We’re starting our drumbeat of continuous execution of vaccine as it is available,” Army Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer for Warp Speed, told reporters Monday. “We package, and we deliver. It is a constant flow of available vaccine.”
Perna and other U.S. officials reiterated their projection that 20 million Americans will be able to get their first shots by the end of December — and 30 million more in January.
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