February 19 coronavirus news

FedEx will make deliveries tomorrow to sites that are open and able to receive vaccine shipments, the company said in a statement.

The company said it will deliver vaccines to areas not impacted by the winter storm.

"We continue to work closely with our healthcare customers and the federal government to safely and swiftly deliver COVID-19 vaccines throughout the U.S.," FedEx said in a statement.

Some background: The frigid temperatures, snow and ice that have devastated parts of the country are having an impact on Covid-19 vaccinations, delaying deliveries and appointments for shots.

To get back on track, Andy Slavitt, the White House senior adviser for Covid response, told CNN's Chris Cuomo officials are going to to have to extend appointment and shipping hours.

CNN's Christina Maxouris contributed to this report.

The Biden administration will work to communicate and build trust with many Americans who have legitimate questions about the safety and efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccine, said Andy Slavitt, the senior adviser to the White House Covid-19 response team, today.

"Of course people also have legitimate questions, and it's important that if they have a legitimate question about the vaccine, they not be ostracized as being anti-vax or anything like that," said Slavitt, speaking with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.  

"They may just want to have their questions answered," he continued. "So, our job, and you'll see us doing this in a much bigger way, particularly over the course of March when we have many more vaccines, is to have real communications, structured dialogue with people that they trust, straight answers, and make sure that the misinformation, the disinformation, and the rumors don't play in."

More than 59 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, according to data published Friday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

The CDC reported that 59,585,043 total doses have been administered — about 76% of the 78,152,495 doses distributed. 

That’s 1.8 million more administered doses reported since yesterday.

More than 41.9 million people have now received at least one dose of the vaccine and more than 17 million people have been fully vaccinated, CDC data shows. 

Note: Data published by the CDC may be delayed, and doses may not have been given on the day reported. 

Pulse oximeters, which have increased in use during the coronavirus pandemic, may yield inaccurate results, the US Food and Drug Administration warned Friday. The agency cited a recent report suggesting the devices may not work as well for people with dark skin pigmentation. 

Pulse oximeters, available through a prescription and over the counter, are devices that measure blood oxygen levels. The readings can be useful for assessing lung function when people have pneumonia or other respiratory symptoms.

“While pulse oximeters may be useful for estimating blood oxygen levels, these devices have limitations that can result in inaccurate readings,” Dr. William Maisel, director of the Office of Product Evaluation and Quality in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement.

And they are not precise.

“For example, if an FDA-cleared pulse oximeter reads 90%, then the true oxygen saturation in the blood is generally between 86-94%,” the FDA said.

The FDA urged patients to consult with a provider if they are concerned about their symptoms or pulse oximetry readings.

In a recent update, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also warned of the potential limitations of pulse oximeters, noting that providers using pulse oximetry on suspected or confirmed coronavirus patients should also assess other factors, like high-risk conditions and Covid-19 symptoms.

The state of Washington earmarked $2.2 billion for new Covid-19 relief Friday, as Gov. Jay Inslee signed legislation passed earlier this month.

The new law sets aside $240 million for business assistance grants, but most of the money will go to additional help for public schools. Additionally, $618 million in additional funding will go toward public health programs, including testing, contact tracing and vaccinations. All of the money comes from federal Covid-19 relief to Washington. Inslee signed a separate bill making Covid-19 grants exempt from state sales tax.

The new funding comes as the head of the health department in Seattle and King County, Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, said they are seeing case counts continue to fall, but he still has concern about variants of Covid-19 that are spreading.

“I have even more respect for the new variant with respect to the threat that it poses,” Duchin said. “If we become complacent, we will regret it.”

Vaccine maker Pfizer is adding a facility in Kansas to its Covid-19 fill-finish vaccine production process and expanding its vaccine production capabilities at locations in Michigan and Connecticut, the company's CEO, Albert Bourla, said during a news conference Friday.

“As part of this expansion, we are adding a new formulation suite here in Kalamazoo…lipid production capabilities in both Kalamazoo and at our site in Groton Connecticut, and fill-finish lines at our site in McPherson, Kansas," Bourla said.

The news conference was held jointly with President Biden after he had toured the Kalamazoo site.

Bourla added the company is also increasing the supply of raw materials from existing suppliers and bringing on new suppliers.

He added that improvements have allowed the company to increase production. 

“We have improved our processes to double the batch size and increase yield, and we have deployed more efficient lab test methods to reduce release times,” Bourla said.

Bourla said that these improvements have allowed the company to reduce their timelines ”from approximately 110 days from start to vial ready” and are now closer to “an average of 60 days, which is an almost 50% improvement.”

Over the next few weeks, Bourla expects to increase the number of doses produced for the US, “from an average of 5 million doses per week, which is the average until now, to more than double of that number, starting from the next couple of weeks."

CNN previously reported at the beginning of February that upgrades to Pfizer’s production process helped the vaccine maker double its output of coronavirus vaccine in the last month. At the time, Pfizer spokesperson Amy Rose told CNN that Pfizer expected production time to be cut nearly in half, from 110 days to an average of 60 days for one batch of Covid-19 vaccine. Pfizer said one batch is equal to between 1 to 3 million doses.

Because coronaviruses like Covid-19 have pandemic potential, the world needs a universal coronavirus vaccine, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday.

“I believe that we have the capability scientifically to develop what we call the universal coronavirus vaccine,” Fauci said in an interview hosted by Georgetown University. “In other words, one that really covers at least all of the SARS-CoV-2 mutations, but also the entire spectrum of the family of coronaviruses.”

A relative of the virus causing Covid-19, called SARS, broke out in 2003-2004, killing close to 800 people before it was stopped. A related virus called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS also occasionally kills people, and several other coronaviruses cause common cold symptoms.

“Fifteen to 30% of all the common colds that you and I experience every winter, repetitively, are coronaviruses – usually four of them,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explained.

Fauci said it’s likely that these coronaviruses hit human civilization as a big pandemic hundreds of years ago, eventually becoming the common cold viruses we are familiar with today.

Irish health authorities have reported three cases of the Covid-19 variant first identified in Brazil, the Irish National Public Health Emergency Team said in a statement on Friday.

“All of the cases identified are directly associated with recent travel from Brazil,” the statement read. “All cases are being followed up by public health teams and enhanced public health measures have been put in place, in line with guidance.”

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, called for investments in pandemic response and preparedness Friday.

He added that the investments would allow experts to work towards ambitious goals, like creating universal coronavirus and flu vaccines, drugs that block virus transmission and diagnostics that could cover 20% of the population per week at a low cost.

“We can create mRNA vaccine factories that have a lot of capacity globally, and those factories can be used for standard vaccines when there's not a pandemic,” Gates said.

“If we have a team of 3,000 global experts, they can be working on things like measles and malaria, and then move over to work on a pandemic,” he added.

He also called for cooperative action to help shrink the disparities in Covid-19 vaccine access between rich and less wealthy nations.

“As the rich countries get on high levels of vaccination, their factories can contribute,” Gates said. “If we do this well, we'll have about a six to eight-month delta of the vaccination levels of the rich to the developing countries – still longer than we'd like.”