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Heavy winter storms, extreme cold and power outages forced the closure of more than 2,000 vaccination centers and delayed the delivery of 6 million doses of the vaccine to 50 U.S. states this week, said White House senior adviser Andy Slavitt during a press conference.
A large part of the United States was hit by extreme weather over the past week. Heavy snowfall and cold temperatures as rare as before hit Oklahoma and Arkansas as well as causing power outages in Texas.
The storms became an obstacle to the Biden administration’s efforts to distribute vaccines. At the beginning of the month, more than 1.5 million doses were being distributed on average per day.
The harsh weather prompted President Biden to postpone his visit from Thursday to Friday in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to take a closer look at Pfizer’s factory that makes coronavirus vaccines.
The weather is improving and resuming at previous rates sending vaccines at 1.4 million doses on Friday alone, Mr Slavitt said.
One year after the outbreak of the virus in the West
Yesterday marked a year since Italy became the first country outside the Asian continent to confirm a case of coronavirus.
On February 20, 2020, doctors in Italy diagnosed a 38-year-old man from Kodonjo with the virus that had just been identified.
Hours later, a 77-year-old from the Veneto region died becoming the first victim of COVID in the West and indicating that the disease had begun to spread in the community.
So far this disease has left over 2.4 million victims globally and has infected over 111 million others.
After the whole world was put under unprecedented isolation measures to control the spread of the virus, the main hope was the development of vaccines that was realized in record time, less than a year after the identification of the pathogen.
But around the world countries are facing difficulties in rapidly vaccinating the population, Various problems have appeared in production cycles that have resulted in lower immunization rates than predicted.
Authorities in New York have reported that they currently have less than 1,000 doses of the vaccine available.
“Delays in distribution have suspended all vaccination efforts,” Avery Cohen, a spokeswoman for New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, said in a Twitter post Saturday.
Problems on production lines have also been complicated by roadblocks and the aggravation of transportation lines by the severe winter storm that has hit much of the United States.
Meanwhile there is growing evidence that vaccines are successful in fighting the pandemic.
According to authorities in Israel, for those who took both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the risk of contracting COVID-19 fell 98.5% while the risk of severe symptoms requiring hospitalization fell 98.9%.
The Israeli Ministry of Health compiled data collected on February 13 from the 1.7 million Israelis who had been vaccinated by January 30. The two-week period from vaccination to data collection enables the body to produce antibodies that fight the virus.
About half of the 9.3 million people in Israel have been vaccinated so far. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that within the next two weeks, 95% of people over the age of 50 will be vaccinated./VOA/
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