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South Africa has received its first shipment of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, the country’s health minister announced Tuesday, putting it on target to become the first in the world to administer the shot.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said on Twitter that South Africa had secured a total 9 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, with the first delivery containing 80,000 shots.
Vaccinations are due to begin this week, he added.
About the vaccine: Developed by Janssen, Johnson & Johnson’s Belgium-based vaccine division, the single-dose vaccine has shown to be effective in preventing moderate and severe disease from South Africa’s coronavirus variant.
The AstraZeneca vaccine: South Africa said it plans to share 1 million unwanted doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine with other countries in the African Union, after early data suggests it provided only “minimal protection” against mild and moderate infections from the South African variant.
North Korea successfully hacked US drug maker Pfizer in an attempt to steal technology related to coronavirus vaccines and treatments, a South Korean lawmaker said.
Ha’s office confirmed the remarks to CNN on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Ha’s office told CNN that North Korea tried to hack pharmaceutical companies or companies that developed Covid-19 vaccine or treatments in a number of ways, including through the South Korean local government’s administration network.
It is not clear when the attack happened. Pfizer told CNN Tuesday it would not comment on the matter.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced today the state has confirmed its first case of the Covid-19 variant first identified in South Africa.
The case is a Middlesex County woman in her 20s with no reported travel, according to the the public health department.
“The Massachusetts State Public Health Laboratory is working in collaboration with many healthcare and academic partners to quickly identify variants of concern by sequencing a subset of positive samples,” the release said.
There are also currently 34 confirmed cases of the B.1.1.7 variant, which was first identified in the United Kingdom, in Massachusetts, the public health department said.
The United Kingdom on Wednesday will call for ceasefires across the globe in order for people living in conflict zones to be vaccinated against Covid-19, the UK Foreign Office said in a statement.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will make the request as he chairs a meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday.
The foreign secretary will say allowing the virus to spread in areas without vaccination campaigns means a greater risk of new variants taking hold — risking further waves across the world, according to the statement.
It states that “more than 160 million people are at risk of being excluded from coronavirus vaccinations because of instability and conflict, including in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia.”
Raab will also use the UK’s presidency of the Security Council this month to push for more funding for the UN’s response to the pandemic, the World Health Organization and for the COVAX initiative to drive progress on global access to vaccines, the foreign office said.
The University of Virginia is banning all in-person gatherings and events due to an increase in cases of the Covid-19 variant, according to a notice sent to the university community on Tuesday.
The notice says all in-person gatherings on or off campus are “prohibited and should be moved online” effective Tuesday at 7 p.m. until at least Feb. 26, at which point the university will consider lifting the ban.
“We have seen an additional – and unusually large – increase in positive cases, spread widely both on and off Grounds,” a letter from UVA President Jim Ryan and other campus leaders said. “Our in-house analysis indicates that this spread is not directly related to variants but instead to transmission of the original strain of the virus, which can occur when individuals are not closely following health and safety protocols.”
There were 117 new cases of Covid-19 reported yesterday, according to UVA’s online dashboard. It’s unclear how many of those cases were also linked to the variant.
Students will be allowed to leave their residence halls to “essential activities,” including attending in-person class, picking up meals, going to and from a job and walking or running outdoors, according to the guidance issued.
University leadership says they are putting this ban in place now to prevent further spread of the virus.
The university plans to lift the ban if conditions improve, but the statement said if they don’t, they will consider other restrictions for the rest of the semester including moving all undergraduate and graduate courses online.
The American Society for Testing and Material, an international technical standards organization, has published the first national standard for consumer masks.
The standards outline things like minimum fit, design, performance and testing requirements for face masks and would require user instructions, package labeling and a permanent tag on the product.
ASTM said it hopes it creates a baseline for quality and protection moving forward.
To be certified as meeting the standards, manufacturers are required to test their facial coverings in accredited labs to certify performance, register their products and use the outlined labeling system to use the ASTM package labeling system.
How this impacts you: Consumers in stores would be able to evaluate the quality of masks on store shelves from the labeling on the packaging. If a mask has ASTM labeling, it could ensure the customer that product has met the testing and quality requirements outlined in “ASTM F3502.”
The ASTM standard labeling requirements indicate results of two testing criteria: breathability and filtration efficiency. Typically, when a mask has a higher filtration, it results in more resistance and can make it harder to breathe.
According to the ASTM guidelines, a lower performance, level one designation would require the product to filter at least 20% of particles – something that would make the mask easy to breathe through, but that would provide less protection. A level two certification would designate high performance filtration of at least 50% of particles but would provide less breathability.
The standards strictly prohibit the use of vents, valves or any feature that allows people to blow out or breathe in unfiltered air.
Global coronavirus cases declined by 16% in the week leading up to Feb. 14, the World Health Organization reported in an update Tuesday.
WHO says 81,000 coronavirus deaths and 2.7 million new cases were reported last week – more than 500,000 fewer new cases compared to the previous week.
New cases declined by double digit percentages in all regions except the Eastern Mediterranean region, and new deaths declined in all regions, WHO reported.
The US is currently reporting the highest number of new cases, by far, followed by Brazil, France, Russia, and the UK and Northern Ireland.
WHO noted that the coronavirus variant first identified in the UK has now been found in 94 countries, the variant first identified in South Africa has been found in 46 and the variant first identified in Brazil has been found in 21.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency will have six vaccination sites staffed with military personnel running next week, including one site in Los Angeles that was launched Tuesday morning, acting administrator Bob Fenton said.
There is an additional FEMA site in Oakland staffed by civilian personnel.
The sites in Houston, Dallas and Arlington, Texas, as well as Queens and Brooklyn in New York, are scheduled to open next Wednesday, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of US Northern Command, said speaking via teleconference.
The sites are a combination of 222-person “type 1” teams, capable of 6,000 vaccinations per day, and 139-person “type 2” teams, capable of 3,000 vaccinations per day.
In total, they will bring FEMA’s total vaccinations to 30,000 vaccinations per day across the sites. The deployments will include approximately 1,000 troops from the Air Force, Navy, Marines, and Army. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin initially authorized the call up of 1,110 troops to assist in vaccination efforts, then added another 3,700 troops.
FEMA has its own supply of vaccine doses to administer and will not be using vaccines from the states’ allocation, Fenton said. That supply stands at 11 million doses per week now, said Fenton, and it is expected to rise to 13.5 million doses next week.
As of now, there are no outstanding requests from states or territories for additional vaccination sites, Fenton added.
The Pentagon has also allocated smaller teams of 25 troops to help in New Jersey and the US Virgin Islands. This is separate from the troops used for vaccination sites.
Initial discussions with FEMA called for 100 teams capable of delivering a total of 450,000 vaccinations per day, far higher than what the planned sites will be able to deliver.
Fenton explained the request for so many teams was based on more vaccine being available in the near future.
“How much will we have to get to those 100 teams? It depends on how much the pharmacies can do, how much states and local governments can handle and what is the gap,” Fenton said. “We want to make sure we have the capability to go up to almost 500,000 vaccines a day. That’s what the 100 teams buys us. How much we’ll use will depend on vaccine supply and the capability of state and local government, the pharmacies, and other avenues.”
In the past three weeks, FEMA has also provided $3.2 billion to 40 states and territories to improve their capability and resources, Fenton said.
Once it is authorized, the rollout of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine will be slower than federal health officials initially anticipated, CNN has learned.
The administration is still expecting single digit millions of doses if the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration. However — due to a miscommunication over the production timeline — government officials thought that number would ramp up to between 20 or 30 million doses by April. They are now expecting fewer than 20 million Johnson and Johnson doses in April, an administration official told CNN.
This delays their expectations by about a month. Officials do still expect to get 100 million doses by the end of June to the beginning of July.
On a call with governors Tuesday, the administration said the initial flow of J&J vaccine would be in the low millions and then would ramp up substantially, according to a source familiar with the call.
Johnson and Johnson did not directly address the slower vaccine rollout, but said in a statement, “Johnson & Johnson intends to distribute vaccine to the U.S. government immediately following authorization, and expects to supply 100 million doses to the U.S. in the first half of 2021. The Company expects to have product available to ship immediately following authorization.”
Some context: Earlier Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto that it could be mid to late May or early June before vaccines are widely available to the general population after he offered an earlier timeline last week.
“I was hoping that that would be by the end of April,” Fauci said. “That was predicated on J&J, the Johnson product, having considerably more doses than now we know they’re going to have.”
“So, that timeline will probably be prolonged, maybe into mid to late May and early June, that’s fine,” Fauci said.
The FDA has scheduled its meeting of independent experts to evaluate the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and make a recommendation on Feb. 26. It has not been authorized yet.
Hate crime attacks against Asian Americans have increased during the pandemic.
More than 2,808 firsthand accounts of anti-Asian hate from 47 states and the District of Columbia were reported between March 19 and Dec. 31, 2020, with 7.3% of those incidents involving Asian Americans over the age of 60, according to a report by Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition documenting anti-Asian hate and discrimination amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
CNN’s Kyung Lah answers your questions from Los Angeles.
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As Congress works to pass another Covid-19 relief package, the Biden administration is ramping up distribution of the vaccines. Meanwhile, the US is seeing a downward trend in new infections, but officials warn the next spike could come from virus variants.
Here is what you need to know to get up to speed.
Covid relief package timeline:
What’s in Democrat’s plan:
Vaccine distribution:
Ramping up rollout:
Kids and Covid-19:
Variants:
Quest Diagnostics said Tuesday it is now sequencing 2,000 tests a week, doubling the amount of genomic sequencing it started performing last month.
The company said it is sequencing the tests for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We are proud to support the CDC’s efforts to track new mutations in, and patterns of transmission of, SARS-CoV-2 across the United States,” Quest said in a statement.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has detailed US efforts to increase genetic sequencing of coronavirus samples in recent weeks, noting that much more is needed to get a better handle on the circulation and prevalence of variants such as B.1.1.7.
In addition to the CDC requesting samples from states for sequencing, its website states that, “CDC has also contracted with commercial diagnostic laboratories and obtained commitments to sequence an additional 6,000 samples per week, with plans for further expansion.”
The joint Federal Emergency Management Agency/Defense Department mass vaccination sites will have their own vaccine supplies, according to Robert Fenton, FEMA’s acting director.
The vaccines will be in addition to the states’ allocations of vaccines.
“This is a supply that’s above and beyond what the state’s allocation is,” Fenton told reporters remotely at the Pentagon. He said FEMA has a supply of approximately 11 million doses to distribute across the states, and that number will rise to 13.5 million next week.
Fenton also said that there were no outstanding requests for vaccination sites from states in the current pilot phase of the program.
“This is part of a pilot to build this federal capability, and we’ve reached out to states,” he said.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told his colleagues in a letter that Congress may take final action on the Covid-19 relief package on the week of March 8.
That means the House will vote on the bill at the end of next week, followed by Senate action. If the Senate amends the bill, it will send it back to the House for final passage the week of March 8.
This timeframe is in line with what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week, which is that she expects the Covid-19 relief package to be on President Biden’s desk by March 14 when jobless benefits expire.
Hoyer said the reason he changed the schedule for next week was because the Covid-19 relief package “will not be ready for a vote until later in the week,” and warned that the House “may need to remain in session through the weekend next week to complete consideration of the American Rescue Plan.”
Read about what is in the House Democrats’ stimulus relief plan here.
More than 55 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, according to data published Tuesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC reported that 55,220,364 total doses have been administered, about 72% of the 71,657,975 doses distributed.
That’s about 2.3 million more administered doses reported since Sunday, for a seven-day average of about 1.7 million doses per day. The CDC did not update its vaccine tracker on Monday.
Nearly 39.7 million people have now received at least one dose of the vaccine and about 15 million people have been fully vaccinated, CDC data shows.
Data published by the CDC may be delayed, and doses may not have been given on the day reported.
The House will vote on the massive Biden stimulus package next week, according to a House Democratic leadership aide. The measure will be part of budget reconciliation legislation, which will be on the floor by the end of next week. It cannot be filibustered in the Senate.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told his members the House will now be in session Tuesday through Friday next week (not Monday through Thursday), the aide said.
Also, he announced to his colleagues the House will vote on a wilderness package and the Equality Act next week.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki walked a tight line Tuesday when asked if President Biden now owns the coronavirus pandemic response. Psaki answered yes — but added conditions.
“However, it’s important for the American people to know what we inherited when the President came into office. And what he inherited was not enough supply, not enough vaccinators, not enough places for vaccinations to happen. Communities had been left to fend for themselves. And so that’s what he’s been focused on and working on,” she added.
Psaki announced earlier in the briefing that the administration is again increasing the weekly Covid-19 vaccine supply being sent to states, as it works to ramp up vaccinations nearly a month in office.
She added of Biden, “But certainly, if he were standing here, he would say that’s the issue he wakes up every morning and is focused on because addressing it is what’s on the minds of the American people. He’s the president, it’s his responsibility to focus on it.”
The Biden administration is again increasing its weekly Covid-19 vaccine supply being sent to states, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced Tuesday.
During a call with governors, White House Covid coordinator Jeff Zients informed the officials that the administration is “increasing the vaccine supply to 13.5 million doses per week to states,” Psaki said at Tuesday’s briefing, a 57% increase from inauguration levels.
Additionally, Psaki said, the administration will be “doubling the supply to our pharmacy program.” This week, there will be 2 million doses sent to pharmacies across the country, she said, which is expected to expand in the coming weeks.
“Eventually,” Psaki said, more than 40,000 pharmacy locations nationwide will be providing vaccines.
This news comes as the administration is working to rapidly scale vaccinations nearly four weeks after taking office amid some confusion and feedback from governors.
Some more context: CNN’s Kevin Liptak reported Monday that a bipartisan group of governors expressed concern at the Biden administration’s vaccine rollout, writing in a letter to the White House that better coordination is needed between the federal government and states on distributing doses to prevent confusion and duplicative efforts.
The executive committee of the National Governors Association, comprised of Democrats and Republicans, raised alarm over two areas of confusion: first, the numbers publicly reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for vaccine distribution; and second, the separate federal distribution systems — including a recently launched program sending vaccines directly to retail pharmacies — they say have caused inefficiencies.
More than 3.03 million children in the US have tested positive for Covid-19 as of February 11, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Last week alone, about 99,000 new child cases were identified through testing, the report said. That’s an 8% increase in child Covid-19 cases over the course of two weeks. Children represent 13% of all cases in the US.
Children made up between 6% and 18.3% of those who were tested for Covid-19, and 5.2% to 29.6% of children tested were positive for the coronavirus, depending on the state.
Children are still considered much less likely than adults to develop severe symptoms of Covid-19 or to die from the disease. Children represented 1.2% to 2.9% of total reported hospitalizations for Covid-19, based on the information provided by 24 states and New York City. Only 0.1% to 2.3% of all cases of Covid-19 in children required hospitalization.
Ten states reported zero child deaths among the 43 states that provided data on Covid-19 mortality. The states that did report having a fatal case saw no more than 0.05% of deaths in children among all confirmed cases of Covid-19.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto Tuesday he thinks the process of widespread vaccinations will likely start in the spring and large portions of the public will be able to be vaccinated by the end of the summer.
Fauci acknowledged that previous estimates had placed vaccine availability for the general public closer to the end of April. He said vaccine availability to large parts of the public could depend on the Johnson & Johnson candidate, which has not yet been given emergency use authorization but is in the process.
“So, that timeline will probably be prolonged, maybe into mid-to-late May and early June, that’s fine,” Fauci said.
Johnson & Johnson will have fewer than 10 million vaccine doses available if the US Food and Drug Administration authorizes it for emergency use in the coming weeks, a federal health official told CNN earlier this month.
The official said the number of doses available would be in the single-digit millions, but that number would ramp up to 20 or 30 million doses by April.
The FDA has scheduled its meeting of independent experts to evaluate the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and make a recommendation on Feb. 26.
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