Covid-19 Live Updates: U.S. Seeks Tens of Millions More Vaccine Doses From Pfizer
Tags: Vaccines, Updates, Coronavirus

The Trump administration is working on a deal that would enable the company to make additional shots for Americans early next year. A surge of infections in Sweden is fueling criticism of the government.

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Hospital staff at the Jefferson Regional Medical Center receiving the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday.Credit…Andrea Morales for The New York Times

The Trump administration is negotiating a deal to use its power to free up supplies of raw materials to help Pfizer produce tens of millions of additional doses of its Covid-19 vaccine for Americans in the first half of next year, people familiar with the situation said.

Should an agreement be struck, it could at least partially remedy a looming shortage that the administration itself arguably helped create by not pre-ordering more doses of the vaccine Pfizer developed with its German partner, BioNTech. Pfizer agreed this summer to provide the United States with 100 million doses by the end of March, enough to inoculate 50 million people since its vaccine requires two shots.

The Pfizer vaccine is one of only two so far that have been proved to work. The Trump administration has locked in only enough doses of the two vaccines — the other, produced by Moderna, is on track to receive emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration this week — to cover 150 million people by the end of June, or less than half the nation.

The administration recently asked Pfizer to sell it enough doses to cover an additional 50 million Americans, but Pfizer said it had already found customers around the world for all the doses it can produce until around the middle of next year.

In recent days, however, Pfizer has indicated that it would be able to manufacture more doses if the administration orders the company’s suppliers to prioritize its purchase requests. The two sides are now negotiating a contract under which Pfizer would provide tens of millions more doses from April to the end of June.

According to one person familiar with the situation, Pfizer asked for that favored status with suppliers months ago. But before it was clear which vaccine trials would succeed, Trump administration officials were apparently worried about hindering other vaccine makers that had accepted billions of dollars in federal subsidies. Federal officials worked to prioritize orders for manufacturing supplies from those firms, including Moderna.

It is unclear whether the government’s concerns about squeezing the supply chain have now faded, or whether its interest in securing more of Pfizer’s vaccine has simply grown. Pfizer announced in November that clinical trials had shown that its vaccine was about 95 percent effective, and the firm was the first to win approval from the F.D.A. for emergency use of its vaccine.

After the company signed a contract last July pledging to sell the United States 100 million doses by the end of March, Pfizer officials suggested at least twice that the Trump administration reserve more doses, but were turned down, according to people familiar with the situation.

Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, told “PBS News Hour” on Monday that in early October, the government resumed negotiations with Pfizer about delivering more doses. But he said Pfizer “resisted giving us any date by which they would do it.”

Moderna, a small Massachusetts-based firm that developed a similar vaccine, agreed last summer to provide the United States with 100 million doses by the end of March. It has now pledged to sell another 100 million doses by the end of June.

— Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visiting the White House earlier this month.Credit…Evan Vucci/Associated Press

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in quarantine after coming in contact with a person who tested positive for the coronavirus, the State Department said in a statement on Wednesday. Mr. Pompeo has so far tested negative, it said.

The statement did not identify the person who had contact with Mr. Pompeo, or when it happened, citing privacy concerns. It was not immediately clear what kind of test Mr. Pompeo had taken or when he was tested, nor whether he was showing any symptoms. Mr. Pompeo is being monitored by the State Department’s medical team, the statement said.

Tests taken too soon after exposure may return false negative results, because the virus has not yet had time to build up to detectable levels. People are thought to carry the largest quantity of virus around the time their symptoms appear, if they experience symptoms at all.

Mr. Pompeo has not traveled abroad since a 10-day trip to Europe and the Middle East last month. His last publicly reported meeting with a foreign official was in Washington last week with the Slovenian foreign minister, Anže Logar.

Even so, he has hosted hundreds of people at several State Department holiday parties in recent days. He was slated to attend one on Tuesday afternoon for family members of diplomats who are stationed abroad, but The Washington Post reported that he canceled the speech he had prepared to give to guests. It was not clear whether he appeared and did not speak, or just skipped the event entirely.

Mr. Pompeo is the latest of the Trump administration’s most senior national security officials to have contact with people who tested positive.

Last month, the Pentagon was notified that Lithuania’s defense minister had tested positive after meeting Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary, and other top military officials. One of them, Anthony J. Tata, a senior Pentagon adviser who is performing the duties of undersecretary of policy, tested positive for the virus afterward.

At least 50 people with close links to the White House have contracted the virus, in addition to guests and others, and President Trump himself, who was hospitalized for a few days in early October after showing symptoms of Covid-19.

After a small White House outbreak in September and a wave of cases in early October, the coronavirus has returned to the top of the Trump administration.

— Lara Jakes and Katherine J. Wu

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A shopping area in central Stockholm in November. The city’s emergency services are overrun, forcing the authorities to recalibrate their looser approach to virus regulations.Credit…Fredrik Sandberg/EPA, via Shutterstock

Since the pandemic began, a debate has raged both inside and outside of Sweden over how to curb the virus. As other countries went into lockdown in the spring, Sweden stayed open out of concern that keeping everyone holed up at home would have long-term detrimental effects on children and adults and could lead to depression, suicide, postponed health care and job losses.

Now, a second wave has brought a new surge in infections and Stockholm’s emergency services are overrun, forcing the authorities to recalibrate their approach. They imposed new restrictions at the end of November that bring the country’s response somewhat more in line with the rest of Europe. They include drastic cutbacks on the size of public gatherings and some school closures.

But with ski lifts, restaurants and bars all remaining open, Sweden’s tougher restrictions still pale in comparison to the rest of Europe and there are mounting concerns that not enough is being done.

On Monday, the Swedish prime minister, Stefan Lofven, said the country’s experts had underestimated the likelihood of a second wave. On Tuesday, a special commission concluded in an initial report that the government had failed to protect older people and was unprepared for the pandemic. During the first wave, deaths were high, especially among those in older age groups.

Since October, infection numbers and deaths have been rising steadily. By Tuesday, the country had reached a total of 320,098 cases since the beginning of the pandemic and its death toll reached 7,667. The country now has 74 deaths per 100,000 cases, less than the United Kingdom, with 97, but far more than its neighbor Norway, with seven.

“I was hoping this grave situation would change things, but yesterday they opened the ski lifts in Sweden,” said Fredrik Elgh, a professor of clinical virology at Umea University.

Mr. Lovfen’s government can only ask, not order, people to follow the recommendations. Under Swedish law, the government isn’t allowed to force people to stay home or fine those who flout them. And face masks aren’t recommended because the Public Health Authority says there isn’t enough scientific evidence that they work.

“We are the only democracy in the world that does not recommend the use of face masks. There are more than 170 countries in the world that recommend using masks. But here they are saying there is not enough science behind that. That is nonsense,” said Mr. Elgh.

— Thomas Erdbrink and Christina Anderson

Mount Sinai hospital president David Reich administered the first COVID-19 vaccine to a hospital maintenance worker, John Gomez, Tuesday in what became something of a public event.Credit…Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Hospitals around the country who have been waiting months for the first doses rapidly scrambled to put together events after unknowns about the vaccine and its distribution made it difficult to perfectly plan for its arrival.

Some hospitals deliberately worked to spotlight the moment, picking a person — a Black or Latino nurse or doctor, a housekeeper — who would be among the first to receive the shot as a way to send a message to diverse communities about trusting the vaccine.

Others — like a hospital in Iowa that first vaccinated a health care worker who had a few upcoming days off, or a hospital in Pittsburgh that let staff members vote on who would get the honor — left the specifics of who would go first more to chance.

But each place was preparing for its own historic moment, the beginning of what they hoped would be the end of a pandemic that had devastated their communities. And in selecting who would be first, each sent a message in its own way about the importance of the vaccine — and recognized the courage of its medical staff.

That health workers in high-risk positions would go first was a common point of agreement through much of the country. An advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week recommended that health care workers should be among the first to receive the vaccine, along with nursing home residents and workers.

Hospitals, with their ability to store vials at subzero temperatures, were prioritized to get the first doses of the vaccine from Pfizer, which was the first drugmaker to get approval from the F.D.A.

— Sharon Otterman

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

A doctor preparing to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Cardiff, Wales, last week.Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

A little over a week after Britain kicked off its mass inoculation program, the first in the world to approve and begin distributing a fully tested vaccine, more than 137,000 people have received shots, the government minister in charge of the rollout wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.

Since the inoculations began last Tuesday, hospitals have distributed some 137,897 vaccines across the country, according to the minister, Nadhim Zahawi. He noted that the figure did not take into account shots administered by primary care doctors, the next phase of the rollout that is intended to reach a broader stretch of the population, which began on Monday.

The Pfizer-BioNTech shots are being prioritized in Britain for health care workers, those 80 years of age or older, and workers and residents at nursing homes. Those who have received the first dose require a second shot after 21 days to enjoy the full benefits of the vaccine.

Britain had an initial batch of 800,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which is enough to vaccinate 400,000 people, but the vaccine’s complex cold storage requirements make it difficult to transport and store in smaller batches, so the rollout has been limited far.

Mr. Zahawi called the figures “a really good start” and said that the government would begin to publish weekly statistics starting next week. In the days since Britain began distributing the vaccine, the United States and Canada have also begun inoculation campaigns, and several other countries have approved the Pfizer-BioNTech shots for emergency use.

Emergency approval for the vaccine in the European Union could come as early as Dec. 21, when the European Medicines Agency meets. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, told the European Parliament on Wednesday that vaccinating enough of the population would be a “huge task.” She encouraged the 27 member states of the bloc to begin on the same day.

“As we have gone in unity through this pandemic, let us start the eradication of this horrible virus together and united,” she said.

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