Vaccine rolled out early as US faces months of record fatalities

Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is expected to be rushed into service with US daily deaths likely to exceed 3000 for months.

US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr Robert Redfield holds up his mask during a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on coronavirus response efforts last September. Picture: Pool/ AFP

Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is expected to be rushed into service in the US immediately to allow millions of doses to be distributed amid warnings that the daily death toll was likely to exceed 3000 for months to come.

Emergency approval for the treatment had been expected on Saturday US time but the federal Food and Drug Administration authorised its use on Friday night, hours after President Donald Trump again criticised the agency’s progress and senior health officials warned that the current record level of fatalities would continue until at least mid-February.

Dr Robert Redfield, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said that “probably for the next 60 to 90 days, we’re going to have more deaths per day than we had on 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbour. The reality is that the vaccine approval this week is not going to really impact that, I think, to any degree for the next 60 days.”

He predicted that the coming months would be “the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation”.

Asked why America led the world in deaths, he said: “It’s because we are an unhealthier nation ... 30 per cent of our nation is obese.”

He referred to huge disparities in healthcare and the prevalence of diabetes and renal disease that made more people vulnerable to coronavirus.

Warning: graphic content. Bodies wrapped in plastic line the walls inside a refrigerated trailer used as a mobile morgue in El Paso, Texas, last month. The coronavirus outbreak has been worsening in the northern winter in the US. Picture: AFP

Health Secretary Alex Azar said he expected to see the first inoculations early in the coming week. “We could see people getting vaccinated Monday, Tuesday,” he told ABC News.

New infections and the daily death toll have climbed to new heights, blamed in part on Thanksgiving holiday gatherings, with more than a million new infections being recorded each week.

Dr Redfield urged people to wear masks and to be “circumspect” about holiday travel.

In Kansas, where just under half of counties decided to mandate mask-wearing, those that did recorded a 6 per cent decline in cases per 100,000 people, he said, while those that did not experienced a rise of more than 100 per cent.

The Times