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The US Department of Veterans Affairs has administered more than 2.1 million Covid-19 vaccine doses, Dr. Richard Stone, acting under secretary for Health at the VA, said during a Senate hearing Wednesday.
Stone said that among enrolled veterans over 75, who are currently prioritized for vaccination, “25% of White, 28% of Hispanic and 30% of Black veterans have been vaccinated.”
He added that 73% of the total VA workforce has received the vaccine.
Stone said the agency has the capacity to deliver between 300,000 and 600,000 vaccine doses per week.
“We were just called on the way over here to say that we would be getting about 500,000 doses this coming week,” Stone said. “We have seen a gradual increase, and we are very hopeful with the new vaccine that’s coming on the market that we will continue to see increases, and the problems that we’re having with the amount of vaccine will resolve itself over these next number of weeks.”
A large study of people across England found strong antibody protection in people who got both doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine – but people who had been infected and got just a single dose had even stronger responses.
The REACT-2 study by scientists at Imperial College London found that three weeks after receiving the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine, 84% of people under the age of 60 tested positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV2.
Among those who had received one dose but had suspected or confirmed prior infection with Covid-19, this rose to 90%.
“We have found a really good response, measured by antibody prevalence, in those who have had two dose of the vaccine and those who have had one dose,” Helen Ward, professor of Public Health at Imperial College London, told reporters at a news conference. “I hope this will be used to encourage people get their second dose.”
“There’s clearly value in getting that first dose,” added Graham Cooke, professor of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College London. “We don’t have enough data yet on the long-term protection of one dose.”
The study of 155,000 people tested between Jan. 28 and Feb. 8 covered 18,000 vaccinated people, including 13,000 who got the Pfizer vaccine.
The findings paint a picture of which groups had been most affected by coronavirus during England’s second wave. Infections were highest in people living in London (16.9%). More than 22% of people of Black ethnicity appeared to have been infected and 20% of people of Asian background had. Just 8.5% of Whites had evidence of having been infected.
Concerns around vaccine confidence were also raised, being more common among younger people and Black people. Reasons for low confidence included worries about pregnancy, allergies and fertility, the study found.
Two separate teams of researchers say they have found a worrying new coronavirus variant in New York City and elsewhere in the Northeast that carries mutations that help it evade the body’s natural immune response – as well as the effects of monoclonal antibody treatments.
One of the mutations is the same concerning change seen in the variant first seen in South Africa and known as B.1.351. It appears to evade, somewhat, the body’s response to vaccines, as well. And it’s becoming more common.
They’ve named the most common variant B.1.526. It appears in people affected in diverse neighborhoods of New York City, they said, and is “scattered in the Northeast.”
The mutation in this variant that most concerns researchers is called E484K and it gives the virus the ability to slip past some of the body’s immune response, as well as the authorized monoclonal antibody treatments. This mutation is popping up independently in many different cases but appears in one particular variant, as well – the one called B.1.526.
But the E484K mutation is seen in at least 59 different lineages of coronavirus, they said – which means it is evolving independently across the nation and across the world in a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. It may give the virus an advantage.
Separately, a team at the California Institute of Technology said they developed a software tool that also spotted the rise of B.1.526 in New York. “It appears that the frequency of lineage B.1.526 has increased rapidly in New York,” they wrote in a pre-print – a report that has not been peer-reviewed but has been posted online.
About 66.5 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, according to data published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC reported that 66,464,947 total doses have been administered, about 75% of the 88,669,035 doses delivered.
That’s about 1.4 million more administered doses reported since yesterday, for a seven-day average of about 1.5 million doses per day.
About 14% of the population — more than 45 million people — have now received at least one dose of vaccine and more than 6% of the population – about 20.6 million people have been fully vaccinated with both shots, CDC data shows.
Note: Data published by the CDC may be delayed, and doses may not have been given on the day reported.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy tested positive for Covid-19 Wednesday, according to his office.
Dunleavy had been in quarantine since Sunday when it was determined he was in close contact with another person who had a confirmed coronavirus case.
His initial test on Sunday came back negative, but he remained in precautionary quarantine. The governor’s office said he was retested after he began to feel ill Tuesday night.
Because he has avoided close contacts since Sunday, Dunleavy’s office said it is not believed that the governor could have spread the coronavirus to anyone else.
The Covid-19 vaccination site at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn — one of the largest vaccination sites in New York state — opened today. The college is set up to vaccinate 3,000 New Yorkers a day.
CNN’s Alexandra Field was on the ground answering your questions about the vaccine roll out. Watch more:
US hospitals are projecting a significant revenue shortfall in 2021 due to the pandemic, according to a new report commissioned by the American Hospital Association.
In an optimistic scenario, hospitals and health systems could suffer a $53 billion loss in total revenue in 2021. Under a more pessimistic budget scenario, that revenue loss could total $122 billion this year.
The optimistic projection assumed that vaccine supply, distribution, and administration aren’t delayed and residents continue to practice social distancing until herd immunity is achieved.
The pessimistic scenario, on the other hand, would be more likely to come true if vaccine supply and distribution are delayed and residents don’t practice social distancing, both of which contribute to a cyclical rise in Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations.
More insight: Treating Covid-19 patients is more expensive for hospitals, especially when they can’t offset those costs with as much usual expected revenue from non-Covid patients.
“During the pandemic, people have put off needed care, in some cases to the detriment of their health,” Rick Pollack, AHA president and CEO, said in a news release. “In addition, the costs of labor and supplies have increased, adding to financial stress.”
Hospitals aren’t just plagued by decreased non-Covid patient volume. They also saw added expenses in many categories last year.
Those costs included a 17% overall uptick in drug expenses per patient discharged and a 16% increase in purchased services per patient, which can include the cost of sterilization and maintaining safe spaces with Covid-19 patients.
Labor expenses were up 14%, due in part to hospitals needing to hire contract labor and give hazard pay to workers. And supply expenses were up 13%, as hospitals needed to purchase personal protective equipment, as shortages of needed equipment led to increased prices.
The new projections come after an AHA report last summer estimated that hospital revenues for 2020 would be down at least $323.1 billion.
The Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine seems to work better against the coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa than data initially suggested.
The variant, which is thought to be more contagious, currently makes up the majority of cases in South Africa and has been found in several countries, including in the United States.
According to a US Food and Drug Administration’s briefing document released Wednesday, the vaccine showed a 64% efficacy rate in South Africa. That’s seven points higher than what was reported in interim data released by the company in January.
Since that time, Johnson & Johnson did additional sequencing and determined there were more cases that could be included in its analysis from South Africa. Nearly 95% of the cases in the study in South Africa came from the variant, according to the addendum to the analysis.
The vaccine has a 72% efficacy rate in the US and a more than 68% rate in Brazil at protecting people from mild to severe/critical disease.
The vaccine offered nearly 86% protection against severe forms of the disease in the US, nearly 82% in South Africa and nearly 88% in Brazil.
Experts have said variants may fuel a surge of cases in the US, and that’s one reason why it’s important to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible.
Moderna has designed an updated version of its Covid-19 vaccine to help it combat the South Africa coronavirus variant, the company announced Wednesday.
Initial doses have been shipped to the US National Institutes of Health for a clinical study.
The new vaccine, called mRNA-1273.351, will be evaluated as a booster shot for people who have already been vaccinated against coronavirus and as a primary vaccine for people who haven’t had coronavirus and have yet to be vaccinated.
Moderna said it will also evaluate a “multivalent” booster shot that combines the new vaccine formulation with the current vaccine.
Additionally, the company said it has begun to test whether a third, lower dose of its current Covid-19 vaccine can increase immunity against coronavirus variants of concern, with some study participants already getting third doses.
On Monday, the US Food and Drug Administration issued new guidance to vaccine makers to address the emergence of coronavirus variants. The agency recommended that data from clinical immunogenicity studies be used to support any changes or updates to vaccines. Such studies would be smaller and could take less time than large-scale clinical trials.
Moderna said it plans to “evaluate immunogenicity and safety in participants” consistent with the recently updated guidance.
“We are moving quickly to test updates to the vaccines that address emerging variants of the virus in the clinic. Moderna is committed to making as many updates to our vaccine as necessary until the pandemic is under control. We hope to demonstrate that booster doses, if necessary, can be done at lower dose levels, which will allow us to provide many more doses to the global community in late 2021 and 2022 if necessary,” Stephane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, said in a news release Wednesday.
Moderna did not say how long it expects the studies to take, or when the new vaccine would be available, if authorized.
Moderna has shipped approximately 55 million Covid-19 doses to the US to date, the company said Wednesday.
An additional approximately 33 million doses have been produced, filled into vials and are in the final stages of production and testing before being released to the US, Moderna said in a news release.
The company now plans to manufacture 700 million doses globally this year, an increase of 100 million doses. In 2022, it says its global capacity will increase to approximately 1.4 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine.
Moderna said it is making new financial investments to achieve that increased capacity at manufacturing sites. The influx of money will enable additional production of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine and potential production of new versions of the vaccine that may be needed to combat coronavirus variants.
The company said it could potentially manufacture even more doses in 2022 if studies show new variant-based versions of the vaccine can be administered at lower dosages than the current vaccine.
The White House officially announced it will continue the national emergency declared by the previous administration surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.
The national emergency was declared last year on March 13, 2020.
In a news release issued today, the White House said “the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause significant risk to the public health and safety of the Nation,” adding that the declaration “must continue in effect beyond March 1, 2021.”
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said he will sign a new executive order that starts on Friday that will ease some of the Covid-19 restrictions that have been in place in the state since the beginning of the pandemic.
The new executive order lifts the modified stay-at-home order that requires people to stay in their residences and businesses to close to the public between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. local time.
Cooper and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen said the statewide mask mandate remains in effect.
Indoor gathering limits increase from 10 to 25, with the limit of 50 for outdoor gatherings remaining the same, the order said.
The curfew for alcohol sales for onsite consumption will now be from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. under the new order.
The order also lightened capacity limits for event venues. Indoor venues that have a capacity over 5,000 can now allow 15% capacity as long as they follow additional safety measures.
Previously, this limit was at 250 people, regardless of venue size. Outdoor venues can now have a capacity of 30%.
By the numbers: According to the state dashboard, 849,630 cases have been reported since the start of the pandemic. There have also been 11,074 deaths reported in North Carolina.
The dashboard showed that 2,180,655 doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the state.
To note: These numbers were released by the state’s public health agency and may not line up exactly in real-time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University, The Covid Tracking Project and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Honduras authorized the emergency use of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against Covid-19, according to a report from the Honduran Health Regulatory Agency (ARSA) on Wednesday.
ARSA detailed in a statement that the authorization was dated Feb. 19 and was based on the consideration of the “regulatory authorities of regional reference,” as a measure to control the pandemic.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, announced that Honduras is the 36th country to approve the use of the Sputnik V vaccine.
Further delays in the delivery of AstraZeneca vaccines are “extremely frustrating,” said Belgian regional Health Minister Wouter Beke during a meeting of the Flemish Parliament Wednesday afternoon.
Beke said Belgium only got 88,800 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine this week instead of the expected 114,716 doses.
“Next week: 21,600 instead of 19,167; and the week after we should get – but I’ll see before we believe it – 127,200 instead of 33,984 deliveries,” Beke said.
The lack of supply this week will be made up for in future deliveries, Beke said but there remains a structural shortage of 31,714 doses across Belgium. He added that the delay in vaccine deliveries is no reason to doubt the efficacy of the vaccine.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration was “surprised” when Johnson & Johnson told them they were behind on manufacturing.
CNN has reported the initial number of doses was expected to be closer to 10 million, and Covid-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said Wednesday it would be between 3 and 4 million.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed Psaki on the amount of Johnson & Johnson vaccine that will be deployed next week, pending emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.
She continued, “We’re going to continue to work with them on ensuring that that can be expedited.”
Watch:
São Paulo, Brazil, will begin a statewide curfew this Friday, the state’s governor, João Doria, announced today.
The curfew — which will run from 11 p.m. until 5 a.m. local time and will remain in place until March 14 — requires bars and restaurants to close and prohibits people from being out in the streets.
The decision is part of a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus, which has led to record hospitalizations.
As of Monday more than 6,400 patients were hospitalized in ICUs across the state, up from the previous record of 6,250 recorded last July.
“It’s a historic record since February last year when we had our first case of Covid in Brazil, here in the state of Sao Paulo,” Doria said.
The governor also said large gatherings will be prohibited at any time of day, and regulations will be enforced with fines.
The increase in hospitalizations is likely due to large gatherings and parties organized 10 days prior during Carnival, the state’s emergency Covid-19 center coordinator, Paulo Menezes, said in a press conference. Menezes said a more contagious variant of the coronavirus might also have played a part.
Correction: An earlier version of this post included the wrong end date for São Paulo’s curfew. The curfew will remain in place until March 14.
France’s health minister announced that the city of Dunkirk in northern France and its surrounding region, an area of 250,000 people, will be put under a new weekend lockdown starting this Friday night.
The minister said the measure was taken as Dunkirk is facing a surge of Covid-19 cases, due to the spread of the British variant.
French Health Minister Olivier Véran said that one in 100 of the population of Dunkirk is infected by the virus every week.
Under the lockdown, only essential shopping and travel will be allowed. The lockdown will be in effect every weekend until further notice.
The government took a similar decision on Monday for the southern region of the Alpes-Maritimes where a partial lockdown is going to be put in place between the coastal towns of Menton and Theoule over the next two weekends in an effort to curb a surge in Covid-19 cases and the spread of new variants.
The biotechnology company Novavax expects to apply for emergency use authorization for its Covid-19 vaccine sometime in the second quarter of 2021, Dr. Gregory Glenn, president of research and development for Novavax, said during a live Q&A with The Washington Post on Wednesday.
“Last week we finished recruiting 30,000 people in the US and Mexico and we’re expecting that result right at the beginning maybe of quarter two – so pretty soon – and shortly thereafter we would be filing for what we call EUA or emergency use authorization in the US,” Glenn said.
The company announced Monday that it has completed enrollment of its PREVENT-19 trial, a Phase 3 study of its Covid-19 vaccine in the United States and Mexico. The trial enrolled 30,000 volunteers across 118 locations.
Johnson & Johnson initially was behind on manufacturing its Covid-19 vaccine when the Biden administration took office last month, but it’s getting better, a White House official said Wednesday.
“We’ve helped them with equipment and raw materials, which I think is helping to increase greater capacity,” he said, adding that the initial production ramp was “slower than we’d like.”
“It was disappointing when we arrived,” Zients said. “I think the progress is real and we look forward to continuing to work with the company to accelerate their delivery and their capacity.”
What happens next: Pending an emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration, Zients said the Biden administration is preparing rollout plans for 3-4 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine next week. Zients said states will receive around 2 million doses of the vaccine, and the remaining doses will be allocated to pharmacies and community health centers.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he hopes that therapeutic approaches to treating long Covid could come from medications already available, but the newly announced initiative to study on long Covid may provide answers.
The aim is to learn more about how the virus may lead to widespread and long-lasting symptoms and to develop ways to treat or prevent them. Initially, the initiative will look at areas including the spectrum of recovery across the population and what the underlying biological cause of prolonged symptoms.
“Once we get that, an important part of this is, as I mentioned, would be to design therapeutic approaches, hopefully by medications that we already have, we just need to know how to use them,” Fauci added.
Long Covid: A study published Friday found that 30% of people with Covid-19 continue to have symptoms up to nine months after initial infection. The most commons symptoms were fatigue and loss of taste or smell, although some reported cough, trouble breathing, muscle aches and brain fog.
Nearly a third reported worse quality of life compared to before getting sick, and some said they had trouble performing at least one usual activity, such as daily chores.
Dr. Fauci discusses ‘long Covid’:
