U.S. Covid-19 Vaccine Booster Campaign Off To Strong Start; Doses ‘Well Tolerated’
The White House COVID-19 Response Team says the Biden administration is off to a very strong start with the Covid-19 vaccine booster campaign and that booster doses are well tolerated.
About 2.78 million people have received an additional booster dose so far, Chief Medical Advisor to the President Dr. Anthony Fauci said at a routine press conference on Tuesday.
U.S. health workers began administering booster shots on Friday, immediately after the FDA and CDC recommended that certain populations receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 Vaccine at least 6 months after completion of their two-dose course of the same vaccine.
The recipients included President Joe Biden, who got inoculated with a vaccine booster shot on Monday.
COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients said that over the past weekend, at pharmacies alone, more than 400,000 Americans received the additional protection of a booster, and almost 1 million people have already scheduled their booster shots through pharmacies over the coming weeks.
Massachusetts and several other states are reaching out to millions of eligible individuals via text messages and email.
New Jersey is opening three mass vaccination centers to give booster shots.
The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service are getting thousands of booster shots in arms each day.
CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said both the FDA and CDC reviewed data on the safety of booster shots, including for those who are 18 to 64. A new MMWR report shows that COVID-19 vaccine booster doses are well tolerated so far.
“The frequency and type of side effects were similar to those seen after the second vaccine doses and were mostly mild or moderate and short-lived,” she told reporters.
Walensky said that the seven-day average of new Covid cases in the U.S. is about 95,000 per day. The seven-day average of hospital admissions is approximately 8,500 per day, and the seven-day average of daily deaths is 1,300 per day.
With 111,162 new Covid infections recorded on Tuesday, the national total reached 43,232,152, as per the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.
An additional 2,543 Covid deaths took the total number of people who died due to the pandemic to 693,069.
As per the latest data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a total of 185,265,610 people in the United States, or 55.8 percent of the population, have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.
A total of 213,752,856 people have received at least one dose.
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