Nearly 9 million Americans had been given their first COVID-19 vaccination dose as of Monday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, as states scrambled to step up inoculations that have yet to slow the roaring pandemic, Reuters reported.
The 8,987,322 people who have been jabbed with the first of two shots, according to the CDC, represent less than one-third of the 25 million total doses distributed to states by the U.S. government.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on Monday sought permission from the Trump administration to directly purchase 100,000 doses of the vaccine manufactured by Pfizer Inc and partner BioNTech SE, which was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use.
The FDA has also approved a vaccine made by Moderna Inc.
“We remain ready to accelerate distribution to get doses into arms,” Whitmer, a first-term Democrat, said in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary 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 has pledged to inoculate 1 million New Yorkers by the end of January.
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is considering releasing to states more vaccine doses that the federal government had stockpiled in an effort to ensure enough supply for a required second dose. Biden takes office on Jan. 20.
Second shots of both authorized vaccines are prescribed for three or four weeks after the first.
Public health experts have said no U.S. state, including New York, has so far come close to using up its federal allotments of vaccines, a much slower-than-expected roll-out blamed in part on rigid rules sharply limiting who can be inoculated.
The vaccinations have yet to make a dent in the health crisis as the pandemic claimed on average about 3,200 lives nationwide each day over the last week. COVID-19 has killed more than 374,000 people in the United States since March.
States in recent days have been adding vaccination capacity with the ad hoc conversion of sports venues, convention halls and empty schools into vaccine centers.
Monday marked the last day of testing for the virus at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, which will be converted to 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, has been an epicenter of the latest surge of the pandemic in the United States, with cases and deaths soaring since early November and many hospitals overwhelmed.
Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told a news conference on Monday that hospitalizations stood at more than 8,000 on Jan. 8, an increase of 884% from early November.
“This deadly virus continues to spread at alarming rates… We fully expect to see another increase now that we are almost two weeks out from the New Year’s holiday,” Ferrer said.
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