Newsman: While the pandemic getting worse in US since the month of May and the daily hospitalization rate and the daily death rates reached highest continuously since last 15 days. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has scheduled a Dec. 10 meeting of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to discuss Pfizer’s request for emergency use authorization (EUA) of its vaccine candidate. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield told Media on Tuesday, A corona virus vaccine will begin to become available in the United States “probably by the end of the second week in December,”
Redfield told in daily briefing that a vaccine would initially be made available “in a hierarchical way” with priority going to “nursing home residents and then some combination of health care providers and individuals at high risk for a poor outcome.” Redfield warned that though we are going to have these vaccines,” Americans should still practice the precautions recommended by health officials. CDC Director Robert Redfield said that a number of 20 million people can get vaccination by the end of the year, if the approval goes on timely.
Meanwhile, the daily hospitalization numbers grows more than 84 thousands in US today and Tuesday, November’ 24, alone the numbers of death were 2,092. Experts are concerns on Thanksgiving Day travel as less people are maintaining or following the CDC safety guide lines. There could be surge of covid-19 deaths by 3000 to 4000 per day as health experts are predicting. CDC director Redfield noted that the surge of cases and hospitalizations across the U.S. is being driven by what he called “the silent epidemic, the asymptomatic infections largely in individuals between the ages of 12 and 35.”
Pfizer and German partner BioNTech announced that their vaccine candidate is 95% effective against COVID-19 in a large, ongoing study. The FDA can grant a EUA before the final testing is fully complete. In addition to the Pfizer/BioNTech candidate, potential vaccines from Massachusetts-based Moderna and British-Swedish giant AstraZeneca have also shown promise. AstraZeneca announced that its vaccine was up to 90% effective against the virus. Moderna announced its vaccine was 94.5% effective and it intended to submit an EUA request to the FDA “in the coming weeks.”