Biden hails extraordinarily effective vaccines, says US 'on track' to begin immunisation

The 46th US President-elect Joe Biden on November 25 said that the United States is “on track” to start the first immunisations against COVID-19 by late December or early-January 2021 and credited the “record-breaking progress” in developing a vaccine. In his Thanksgiving address, the president-elect talked about several vaccines that have shown promising results in their interim analysis. Prior to Biden’s speech, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna announced their COVID-19 vaccine candidates to be 95% and 94% efficient against the highly-infectious disease. 

Oxford University’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate developed in collaboration with AstraZeneca also showed high efficacy but budded doubts with the reports of ‘error’ following the results. Apart from indicating the time of first immunisations, Biden also said in his address from Delaware that the entire country will be vaccinated as soon as possible and added, “which we will do, but it's going to take time.”

“There's been significant record-breaking progress made recently in developing a vaccine and several of these vaccines look extraordinarily effective. It happens to be on track for the first immunisation to begin by late December-early January,” Biden said. 

I hope with the news of the vaccine will serve as an incentive to every American to take the simple steps to get control of the virus,” the President-elect added.

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Herd immunity in US by May

As more and more COVID-19 vaccine candidates are showing promising results, White House vaccine chief Moncef Slaoui had also said that first Americans could receive the vaccine dosage ‘as early as the second week of December’. While talking to a media outlet, Slaoui also said that based on the plans of the US government, the entire population that need to be vaccinated for the life to return to normalcy is expected to take place in May. He had told another media outlet that with the levels of efficacy that have been shown by both vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, at least 70 per cent of the immunised population would pave the way for ‘true herd immunity’ to take place. 

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