COVID-19: Biggest vaccination drive begins in US as trucks carrying Pfizer vaccine hit roads

The biggest vaccination drive in the history of US started on Sunday (December 13) as trucks carrying Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine pulled out of a Michigan warehouse.

It is learnt that 636 hospitals and clinics across the states will be delivered the Pfizer vaccines under Operation Warp Speed.

Sources said that trucks carrying about 184,275 vials of vaccine pulled out of the plant in Michigan and it is expected that 189 boxes of vaccine vials would arrive in all 50 states on Monday. 

According to US pharma giant Pfizer, there are five doses of vaccine per vial.

The vaccine developed by Pfizer comes at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has killed nearly 300,000 people in the country. 

On Friday, the US Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to COVID-19 vaccine and on Saturday it was decided by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that the vaccine could be given to people age 16 and older in the US.

Operation Warp Speed chief advisor Dr Moncef Slaoui told Fox News that they are planning to distribute about 14 million doses of vaccine across the US by the end of this year.

“And the next month, we will have about 50 million to 80 million doses distributed in January, and another same number in February. So, all in all, we hope to have immunized 100 million people, which would be the long-term care facility people, the elderly people with comorbidities, the first-line workers, the health care workers,” he said.

According to Slaoui, about 75 or 80 per cent of the population in the US need to be inoculated before herd immunity can be established in the country. “We hope to reach that point between the month of May and the month of June,” he said.

(With PTI inputs)