Mass drive for COVID-19 shots gets underway

The biggest logistical effort in the history of the United States was getting under way as authorities counted down to the first post-trial vaccinations on Monday.

On Saturday, Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, said Monday would mark the start of vaccinations, using a product developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.

The development comes after more than 300,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the US.

With distribution of a second vaccine from Moderna expected to follow shortly, as many as 40 million doses could be delivered by the end of the year. This would be enough to vaccinate the CDC's first priority group: healthcare workers at high risk of exposure to the virus and residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities.

As hospitals prepared to receive the Pfizer vaccine, the US on Saturday reported that had coronavirus infections had topped, 16 million, according to federal officials.

The country reported its highest daily cases, more than 232,700, on Friday, according to a Reuters tally. In the latest seven-day average, the US reported 2,411 deaths per day, the highest seven-day average since the pandemic started. US coronavirus hospitalizations were 107,684 by the end of Friday, the highest so far.

General Gustave Perna, the chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to bring a vaccine to market, said on Saturday at a news conference that nearly 3 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine are being sent by planes and trucks to 145 sites on Monday, 425 on Tuesday and 66 on Wednesday.

Early on Sunday morning, boxes packed at Pfizer's plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan, were being shipped to UPS and FedEx distribution hubs, where they were to be sent to the 636 designated locations across the country.

To ship its vaccine, Pfizer designed specialized containers packed with enough dry ice to keep a minimum of 975 doses cool for up to 10 days. Each comes with a tracking device.

"This is the moment we've been waiting for," Wes Wheeler, president of FedEx's healthcare division, said in an interview on Saturday. "We've been planning for months with daily calls, drilling down to really quite minute details."

FDA officials on Saturday said vaccination sites will have medical personnel on hand to deal with people's side effects such as severe allergic reactions.

The officials made the comments after two people in the UK experienced reactions after getting the vaccine.

Agencies contributed to this story.