The CDC says 9 million Americans have now been vaccinated while US states are fighting

(Reuters) – Nearly 9 million Americans have been given the first dose of COVID-19 vaccination since Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said as states rushed to intensify inoculations that have not yet slowed the pandemic. screaming.

According to the CDC, the 8,987,322 people who were hit by the first of the two shots represent less than a third of the 25 million total doses distributed to states by the US government.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Monday sought permission from the Trump administration to buy directly 100,000 doses of the vaccine manufactured by Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE, which has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use.

The FDA also approved a vaccine produced by Moderna Inc.

“We are ready to speed up distribution to get gun doses,” Whitmer, a first-term Democrat, said in a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters that the city could run out of vaccine doses if the federal government does not send more. He pledged to inoculate 1 million New Yorkers by the end of January.

US President-elect Joe Biden is considering issuing several doses of vaccine to states, which the federal government has stockpiled in an effort to provide enough for the second dose. Biden takes office on January 20.

The second shot of both authorized vaccines is prescribed for three or four weeks after the first.

Public health experts say no U.S. state, including New York, has so far come close to using its federal vaccine allocations, a much slower-than-expected release, blamed in part on rigid rules that abruptly limit who can be inoculated.

Vaccinations have not yet made a drop in the health crisis, as the pandemic has averaged about 3,200 lives nationwide each day in the past week. COVID-19 has killed more than 374,000 people in the United States since March.

In recent days, states have added vaccination capacity with the ad hoc transformation of sports venues, convention halls and empty schools into vaccination centers.

DODGER STAGE BECOMES A MASS VACCINATION SITE

Monday marked the last day of testing for the virus at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, which will be turned into a mass vaccination site by the end of the week, according to local leaders.

Los Angeles County, with a population of about 10 million people, was an epicenter of the latest pandemic wave in the United States, with cases and deaths rising since early November and many hospitals overwhelmed.

Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told a news conference Monday that hospitalizations rose to more than 8,000 on Jan. 8, up 884 percent from early November.

“This deadly virus continues to spread at alarming rates … We fully expect to see another increase now, as we are almost two weeks away from the New Year holiday,” Ferrer said.

Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo dropped a request for all health care workers to be given a vaccine before other groups became eligible, leading to hundreds of doses being wasted as the half-finished vials they were thrown away at the end of each day.

Since then, he has said that certain groups of other key workers and people over the age of 75 from Monday can make appointments to receive a shot.

There are now more than 4 million people in New York State eligible to receive the vaccine out of a population of about 19 million, Cuomo said Monday in his annual statewide speech, but only about 1 million doses at hand.

“We only get 300,000 doses a week from the federal government,” he said. “At this rate, it will take us 14 weeks, just to get enough doses for those currently eligible.”

New York has so far recorded nearly 40,000 COVID-19 deaths, by far most of any American state. Nearly 30,000 people have died in California, the nation’s most populous state.

Texas and Florida have vaccinated people over the age of 65 since the end of December, although reports from those states indicate that demand has far exceeded appointments.