The Trump administration is set to deliver new guidelines today that will get coronavirus vaccinations moving much faster. New federal guidelines will recommend opening up the process to everyone older than 65, and will also aim to move doses out the door rather than holding some back. The early phases of the vaccination effort were designed to put the highest-risk people at the front of the line, but the pace of inoculations has frustrated experts and everyday Americans alike. The administration’s new guidelines
aim to speed things up and ultimately move the U.S. closer to the widespread immunity that will put the pandemic behind us.
In other vaccine news, immunity from Moderna Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine should last at least a year, the company said on Monday at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference. The drug maker said it was confident that the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology it used was well suited to deploy a vaccine based on the new variant of the coronavirus which has emerged in a handful of countries. The company’s vaccine, mRNA-1273, uses synthetic mRNA to mimic the surface of the coronavirus and teach the immune system to recognize and neutralize it.