FDA to rule on long-awaited ‘protein-based’ COVID-19 vaccine this week

Another COVID-19 vaccine may be on its way to the United States as FDA advisors discuss the Novavax protein-based injection this week, but the country is reporting that millions of injections are wasted due to a lack of demand, often putting Americans at risk from the virus that spawns every day. continues to decrease.

This week, the Food and Drug Administration’s Main Advisory Committee, Vaccines and Related Biologicals Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) will meet to discuss authorization for the injection of Novavax, an injection a year ago that many believed was more accessible. Reported seriously late due to delivery issues.

However, there is growing evidence that adding another vaccine to the country’s rotation may not be beneficial at this point. Information obtained by NBC from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that the country trashed 82.1 million doses of vaccines in December 2020, accounting for more than ten percent of the total number of vaccines purchased.

A survey released last month by Gallup shows that less than a third of Americans still worry about the virus, and the launch of the third and fourth COVID-19 vaccine injections has so far been disappointing. injections were extremely low.

This is due to the reduced mortality of the virus due to both the milder nature of the Omicron variant and the effectiveness of the first two vaccines in preventing hospitalization or death from the virus. Americans now have an average of 106,979 cases per day, but only 547 deaths per day.

The long-awaited Novavax vaccine is viewed by many as the “gold standard” because the two-dose vaccine uses the same technology used in the standard flu vaccine and other vaccines that people receive throughout their lifetimes. Pfizer and Moderna injections, the two most popular vaccines on the market today, use an mRNA base.

Although mRNA is considered safe and effective for use in vaccines by leading experts and regulators around the world, many were reluctant to receive injections, which mainly used relatively obsolete and unknown technology.

Some experts hope that the more standardized formulation of protein-based vaccines will convince some who are still reluctant to inject.

However, the remaining group of unvaccinated Americans is small. About 90% of US adults have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine, and more than 75% are fully vaccinated.

Children are also at low risk of contracting the virus, accounting for 0.1% of deaths recorded in the United States since the virus first emerged in March 2020.

Also, there is little evidence of the effectiveness of the injection against the Omicron variant, with injection trials done before the vaccine-resistant variant took the world by storm in late 2021.

However, it was 90% effective in preventing infection against previous variants in most populations.

Approving another coup could mean a new US buyout order, assuming the White House can get much-needed funding for the pandemic. But most of the blows to taxpayers in the past year and a half have been lost.

The NBC report found that discarded doses accounted for more than 11% of the supply purchased from America.

While the exact price of these discarded injections cannot be determined due to the fluid nature of vaccine negotiations, each dose is likely to cost $20 or more. That means more than $1.6 billion in taxpayer money is burned in unused records.

Most of these doses are discarded because they are past their expiration date because once the vaccine vial is removed from ultra-cold storage it has a limited shelf life under normal refrigerator conditions.

As demand for injections began to wane after an initial surge in spring 2020, many vaccine suppliers had to start throwing away unused injections. The NBC report states that CVS and Walmart eliminated all vendors’ top hits.

While the former Americas weren’t too big to photograph in the way the federal government expected, the rollout of COVID-19 boosters was slow when they were first made available in the fall of 2021.

When the fourth injection dose was approved for Americans aged 50 and older earlier this year, minor changes were also seen in the daily administered vaccines.

A Gallup poll released last month found that only 31% of Americans say they are “quite worried” or “very worried” about contracting COVID-19. Within this group, 17 percent of Americans said they were still “very worried” about Covid, down 5 percent.

The survey points to the changing state of the virus as America approaches summer. In previous years, warmer months were accompanied by massive waves of devastating viruses.

The study was conducted in mid-April, when the downward trend in cases, which had existed for about three months after the Omicron winter peak in mid-January, began to reverse.

Participants were asked what their feelings were about the pandemic, the virus, and the personal restraint strategies they used or ignored in their daily lives.

The survey also revealed that 64% of Americans believe the pandemic is getting better. During the investigation, cases dropped to just under 30,000 a day, making it one of the lowest since the pandemic began in March 2020.

About 21% of Americans said they believed the situation was more or less the same, and only 12% believed it was getting worse.

These few Americans last believed that the situation had deteriorated in the summer of 2021, when cases hit rock bottom just before the Delta variant exploded.

These good feelings also led to some behavioral changes. Only 17% of Americans reported maintaining social distancing, the lowest point of the pandemic to date.

Just under a third of Americans said they avoid large crowds, a fifth said they avoid public places, and only 15% said they avoid small gatherings.

These numbers are also pandemic lows, according to Gallup reports.