“It seems to be very effective in spreading from person to person,” said director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for CN Cu Chris Cuomo, adding that recent studies show it could be more deadly and cause more severe disease.
The British variant is already on track to become dominant in hotspots such as Florida and Southern California “in a few weeks,” according to a test company called Helix, which helped identify the largest share of cases in the United States.
The only way to prevent variants from becoming dominant is to prevent them from spreading from person to person, following public health measures and vaccinating as many people as possible, Fauci said.
Fauci wrote on Twitter on Thursday that he hopes the data will support coronavirus vaccinations for older children by late spring or early summer.
The US Food and Drug Administration also said on Thursday that it intends to use the flu vaccine update process as a model for authorizing any changes to coronavirus vaccines to address new developments.
“We have the opportunity and the ability to try to stop them from becoming dominant,” Fauci said.
The new vaccines hope to ease the burden if approved
How quickly the spread of vaccination rates has spread will be a key factor in the number of coronavirus deaths in the coming months, according to the latest forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
New coronavirus vaccines added to the market could help speed up the inoculation process.
Biotech company Novavax announced on Thursday that the process of “continuous review” for the authorization of its Covid-19 vaccine is underway in several countries.
The vaccine manufacturer has announced that it has begun proceedings with several regulatory agencies, including the US FDA, the European Medicines Agency, the UK Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency and Health Canada. Ongoing review means that the company will send a few completed sections of its application for authorization, instead of waiting for the entire application to be completed.
And Johnson & Johnson officially applied to the FDA for emergency use of its Covid-19 vaccine on Thursday.
The company has developed a single-injection vaccine that could help reduce the “burden of human disease globally and end the pandemic,” said Dr. Paul Stoffels, scientific director at Johnson & Johnson, in a statement.
The FDA will schedule a public meeting, and if the agency decides to authorize the vaccine, the CDC Committee on Immunization Practices will meet to discuss whether the vaccine should be given to Americans and, if so, who should receive it first.
Pushing to vaccinate teachers and return to class
As some students have been approaching their classes for almost a year, officials have been eager to see a return to personal learning.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that with proper spacing, masking and testing, schools can safely resume on campus even before teachers are vaccinated. But many states make teacher inoculation a priority.
To date, 24 states and Washington, DC now allow teachers or school staff to receive the vaccine.
In West Virginia, all teachers over the age of 50 who have said they already want the vaccine have received it, according to Gov. Jim Justice. In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine has established a plan for all teachers to be vaccinated by the end of February so that all students can return to classrooms by March 1.
Alabama and Colorado will include teachers who can be vaccinated starting Monday.
But the availability of doses still poses a problem in many states, officials have complained that their dose allocation does not meet demand.
In some cities, such as Chicago and Minneapolis, officials are at odds with teachers’ unions and schools, as their efforts to reopen are met with a concern for the safety of staff, students and families. In some cases, tensions have turned into strikes and threats.
Fauci promotes two doses of vaccine for those previously infected
Separately, Fauci said on Thursday that even those who already had Covid-19 should still be vaccinated.
“If you have had Covid-19, you should continue to be vaccinated. Because reinfection is less common 90 days after the initial infection, you can delay vaccination until the end of the 90-day period, if you wish. But vaccination is still available. “I’m back from Covid-19,” he said in a tweet.
Although a study earlier in the week suggested that people who had previously been infected with coronavirus might need only one shot of Covid-19 vaccines, Fauci pushed back.
The authors of this prepress study, which was not reviewed by colleagues, argued that changing the policy to give these individuals a single dose would “relieve them of unnecessary pain and release many doses of emergency vaccine.”
A previous infection may help initiate vaccination, Twitter wrote on Fauci, but there is still not enough evidence to show that it is enough to compare two doses for most people.
“People who have had COVID-19 should continue to follow the current @FDA guideline,” he said.
Michael Nedelman, Maggie Fox, Andrea Diaz, Jacqueline Howard, Yon Pomrenze, Evan Simko-Bednarski, Elizabeth Stuart and Naomi Thomas contributed to this report.