Coronavirus live updates: Trump reverses course on plan to have White House staff get vaccine first

7 min readDec 14, 2020

The United States and Europe have handled the coronavirus outbreak differently. The Post’s Rick Noack explains Europe’s strategy. (Alexa Juliana Ard, Rick Noack/The Washington Post)

President Trump reversed course on a plan to have some White House staff members be among the first Americans to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Earlier, White House officials had said senior members of the administration would receive priority, an announcement that drew criticism in light of the fact Trump and his top advisers have repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic while flouting public health guidance.

Here are some significant developments:

Nearly 3 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are arriving at 636 locations in next several days, with 145 sites, mostly health-care systems, expected to receive doses Monday.
The United States is pushing to procure more doses of the vaccine in the second quarter of 2021, after having passed on the opportunity to secure 100 million doses. But no agreement has yet been signed, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on CNN Monday.
The Trump administration is rushing to put out a last-minute public service campaign in support of the vaccine rollout. More than eight in 10 Americans now say they would take the vaccine, but are divided on the question of how soon, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Speaking to ABC News, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn said the agency does not agree with Trump that the vaccine “could have been out a week earlier.”
More than 16.3 million coronavirus infections and close to 300,000 fatalities have been reported in the United States since February.
Germany said it would enter a hard lockdown over Christmas and New Year’s Day with singing in church banned and all shops closed, except those selling food.

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First five vaccinations set for Monday at hospital in the District

The coronavirus vaccine will go into arms in the nation’s capital as soon as Monday afternoon.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar will be on hand at 2:30 p.m. at George Washington University Hospital in Washington when five of the hospital’s health-care workers receive doses of the newly approved immunization, a senior administration official said late Sunday night.

Although news reports have said that White House staff members are among those who will be offered early doses of the vaccine, which has received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, the event on Monday is designed to highlight the typical process of rolling out inoculations.

The hospital alone decided who would be at the head of the line. Azar will not receive a shot but plans to do so at some point to help advance public acceptance of the vaccine, the administration official said, speaking on background for planning purposes.

That is the license plate on Joseph Varon’s Mercedes 550. A vanity plate can be construed as grandiosity — but in this case, it is quite literal.

Varon, a 58-year-old physician and chief of staff at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, has been hunting covid-19 for more than 260 days straight. He has not had a single day off since March.

There can be no vacation when a pandemic is tearing through the country, your covid-19 unit is filled with more than 45 patients and your staff is exhausted.

Varon’s passion for medicine has fueled his determination “to nail this thing to the ground.”

“I was meant to do this,” he told The Washington Post.

Varon is both a medical maverick and a kind spirit. Despite his media appearances in which he predicted this winter will be “the darkest days in modern American medical history,” he has maintained a cheerful disposition and a deep sense of purpose.

Cold, hard science powered the race that produced the first coronavirus vaccine, which was given emergency use authorization Friday evening after the Food and Drug Administration said earlier in the day it would “rapidly work toward” the authorization. The challenge next moves to more-fraught terrain — getting impatient Americans to understand that, while a vaccine is here, most will have to wait.

Hospital systems are experiencing a surge of covid-19 this month, and it will almost certainly take several months or longer in 2021 before people can resume their pre-pandemic lives. Indeed, now is the time to be more careful than ever.

President Trump’s erratic, unrealistic and untruthful leadership during the U.S. pandemic response left the country poorly prepared for the concerted fight needed to vanquish the coronavirus and made it vulnerable to a winter spike in cases and deaths, according to experts on pandemic leadership and mass psychology.

Canada could begin immunizing residents against the coronavirus as early as Monday after receiving its first batch of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine overnight.

“The first batch of doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine have arrived in Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Twitter and Instagram late Sunday, attaching a photo of a cargo plane and two Canadian border agents. The shipment arrived at the Mirabel international airport in Montreal.

The first 30,000 doses were shipped from Belgium and will be distributed to 14 sites across Canada, the Reuters news agency reported. The first residents to receive the vaccine will be in long-term care facilities in the province of Quebec, Canadian media reported.

The nationwide program will also prioritize front line health-care workers. In Canada’s more remote territories, no distribution sites have been set up because of issues transporting the Pfizer vaccine, which needs to be stored in ultracold temperatures.

Canada will be among the first Western nations — including the United States and Britain — to begin vaccinating citizens, even as cases have surged in all three countries in recent weeks.

Trudeau has said that up to 249,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine would be in Canada by the end of the year, Canada’s Global News reported. In total, Canada has secured more than 400 million doses of various coronavirus vaccines for its population of just 38 million.

More than 13,400 people have died in Canada from the coronavirus.

France is mass testing residents for coronavirus in two cities ahead of plans to lift travel and other restrictions for the holidays. (Charles Platiau/Reuters)

Two French cities began mass testing residents Monday as part of a campaign to detect and isolate coronavirus cases ahead of a government plan to lift restrictions for the holidays.

The pilot program is taking place in Le Havre on the northern coast and in Charleville-Mézières near the Belgian border — areas recently hard hit by the virus.

Health officials say that they hope to initially screen tens of thousands of residents this week, using new rapid antigen tests capable of producing results within minutes.

“If we can test a significant number of people, we will obviously find among them those who are asymptomatic … and by doing so, we will avoid extra transmissions,” Le Havre’s mayor, Édouard Philippe, told French media over the weekend.

The campaign in Le Havre will include the mobilization of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and first aid personnel, and will be carried out at more than 50 sites in and around the city, Philippe said. The first tests would be made available to teachers and students in the public school network.

On Tuesday, France will lift measures it imposed in October during a new wave of infections. A daily nighttime curfew will remain in place, with the exception of Christmas Eve.

The move stands in contrast to France’s neighbors, Germany and Italy, where new lockdown restrictions have been announced for the holidays. France is testing its new “test-alert-protect” strategy to fight the virus.

The death toll from covid-19 in France is more than 58,000. The country right now is averaging about 10,000 new infections each day.

Coronavirus live updates: Trump reverses course on plan to have White House staff get vaccine first

First five vaccinations set for Monday at hospital in the District

Written by 2k21 Update News