Fauci: Coronavirus variants a ‘wake-up call’ to speed up vaccinations

The spread of coronavirus variants in the United States and around the world should serve as a “wake-up call” to speed up vaccinations, Dr. Anthony Fauci said.

Fauci’s push to vaccinate “as quickly as we can” comes as global trials of the Novavax and Johnson & Johnson vaccines showed the shots were less effective against the variant identified in South Africa.

“This is a wake-up call to all of us,” the nation’s top infectious diseases doc said in a briefing with other key Biden administration health officials on Friday.

“We will continue to see the evolution of mutants. So that means we, as a government, the companies, all of us that are in this together, will have to be nimble to be able to just adjust readily to make versions of the vaccine that actually are specifically directed towards whatever mutation is actually traveling at any given time,” Fauci said.

He added that the new strains provide “an incentive to do what we’ve been saying all along — to vaccinate as widely as we can, as quickly as we can.”

Health officials said the variant first detected in the United Kingdom had been confirmed in 379 cases across 29 U.S. states as of Wednesday.

Earlier this week, the variant from Brazil was detected in Minnesota. Two people in South Carolina have been infected with the South African variant. The two did not know each other and had not traveled to the region.

“We expected this — and this is why I feel compelled to underscore for you the need for each of us to remain steadfast in our commitment to taking all of the appropriate steps to protect ourselves and our communities,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director and Massachusetts General Hospital alum Dr. Rochelle Walensky said, adding that the CDC is “rapidly ramping up surveillance and sequencing” to identify and monitor new variants.

About 6.5% of the U.S. population has received one vaccine dose. The nation’s seven-day average number of shots administered was 1.2 million per day, officials said, keeping the country on pace with Biden’s goal of 100 million shots in his first 100 days.

But challenges with increasing supply and speeding up physical vaccinations remain, health officials said.

Medical experts from Johns Hopkins University also stressed the importance of getting the virus under control.

“As long as this virus is continuing to circulate there are more opportunities for mutations to occur,” Jennifer Nuzzo said. “And it really then, I think, becomes a race against time to make sure we try to control this virus as quickly as possible.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3cpEm5k