COVID-19 Vaccine: Enlisting Retired Clinicians / Vaccine Numbers / Shipments & Collaboration

By Kelly Young

Edited by Susan Sadoughi, MD, and Richard Saitz, MD, MPH, FACP, DFASAM

Here are some of the recent developments on COVID-19 vaccines:

Enlisting retired clinicians: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will allow clinicians who have recently retired or become inactive to administer COVID-19 vaccines. The agency will also allow licensed clinicians to administer vaccines in other states.

Vaccine numbers: Over 23 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered so far in the United States, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters on Wednesday. More than 3 million of those are second doses. An estimated 6% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose. This comes at a time when the CDC is projecting the country could reach as many as 514,000 COVID-19-related deaths by Feb. 20.

Shipments & collaboration: Pfizer and BioNTech are expected to provide 120 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccine to the United States by the end of March. This is 20 million more doses than the companies initially pledged, Bloomberg reports. The change stems from a labeling update that lets clinicians get one additional dose from every vial. The U.S. also purchased an additional 100 million doses of the vaccine to be delivered this summer. Elsewhere, Sanofi said on Wednesday that it would help manufacture 125 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the European Union. Meanwhile, Sanofi continues to develop two of its own vaccine candidates.