(MONTGOMERY, Ala.) — Alabama continues to struggle with its vaccine rollout, with less than half of the COVID-19 vaccines delivered to the state making it into arms, according to health officials.
While there’s a discrepancy between the vaccine data the state health department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are reporting, both datasets depict a sluggish rollout, with far more doses distributed than administered.
According to the state health department, Alabama has received 772,275 vaccine doses and administered 323,875. The CDC reported that 655,275 doses have been delivered and 278,993 of them administered.
That translates to just 5,690 doses given for every 100,000 people, according to the CDC data, and puts Alabama last in the nation for vaccine distribution. As a point of comparison, West Virginia, which has among the best COVID-19 vaccination rate per capita in the country, has vaccinated 12,533 out of every 100,000 residents as of Jan. 29, according to the CDC.
“We talk to the CDC every day and I stress that even though we might have a difference on data, we are still working together,” Dr. Karen Landers, assistant state health officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health, told ABC Birmingham affiliate WBMA. According to Landers, the state dashboard updates quicker than the CDC’s website.
Landers said that part of Alabama’s problem is that certain medical facilities ordered too many vaccines, a misallocation that means roughly 4,000 doses need to be moved to facilities in need of that supply. Another issue is that Alabama’s public health infrastructure is notably sparse, experts say. One county in the state has neither a hospital, nor a health department. Then there’s lingering distrust of the medical community linked to the infamous Tuskegee experiment, where doctors denied Black patients treatment for syphilis as part of a medical study in Tuskegee, Alabama.
“That still haunts us today,” Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP told the Washington Post late last year.
Like many governors around the country, Gov. Kay Ivey said Alabama needs more vaccine supply to improve its rollout.
“We have all been frustrated that the supply of vaccine coming from the federal government hasn’t kept up with the demand,” Ivey said in a statement Friday. “To be blunt, we simply haven’t gotten the vaccine that we’ve been promised, and this has created a major backlog of aggravation.”
Dr. Scott Harris, state health officer, responded to criticism from Alabama residents last week about the pace of the rollout. Many of the vaccines that haven’t been administered are reserved for people waiting for their second dose, he explained during a Jan. 21 press conference.
“I think we can also do things faster,” he said. “People certainly have a right to expect that we can do things faster.”
ABC News’ Meredith Deliso contributed to this report.
Leonid Ikan/iStockBy EMILY SHAPIRO and MARIAM ALAM, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — Break out the gloves and hats — the coldest air of the season is slamming the Northeast.
Boston hit 7 degrees Friday morning — the city’s coldest temperature in two years.
On Saturday morning, the wind chill — what the temperature feels like — is expected to plunge to 1 degree in New York City, minus 7 degrees in Boston and minus 8 degrees in Syracuse, New York.
Here is your cheat sheet for how to brave the frigid weather, from what to wear outside to what to remember when driving. How to stay safe outside
Those with prolonged exposure or those not dressed appropriately for the weather are in danger of frostbite and hypothermia, National Weather Service meteorologist Jay Engle told ABC News.
Frostbite results in the loss of feeling and color in affected areas — usually the nose, ears, cheeks, fingers, toes or chin, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Frostbite could potentially cause permanent damage and, in severe cases, can lead to amputation, the CDC said.
Someone suffering from frostbite can be unaware of it because tissues that become frozen are numb, the CDC said. These are all signs of frostbite: numbness, white or grayish-yellow skin, or skin that feels unusually firm or waxy.
“Don’t rub your hands — if you have frost-nip or frostbite, rubbing actually causes tissue damage,” Dr. Randall Wexler, professor of family medicine at Ohio State University, told ABC News.
If you think you are developing frostbite, “keep the area covered if you can … because if you have frostbite on your hand and you pull off your glove, you may cause tissue damage,” Wexler said.
He added, “That’s also when you want to start trying to raise your core body temperature — get rid of wet clothes, put on clothes that are warm and dry.”
There’s also hypothermia — or abnormally low body temperature — which can impact the brain, “making the victim unable to think clearly or move well,” the CDC said. “This makes hypothermia especially dangerous, because a person may not know that it’s happening and won’t be able to do anything about it.”
Warning signs for adults are shivering, exhaustion, confusion, fumbling hands, memory loss, slurred speech and drowsiness. Warning signs for infants are bright red or cold skin and very low energy, the CDC said.
Engle recommends to “dress in three or more layers. One big thick winter coat tends not to do the trick. You have to have a thick sweater underneath and then a lighter jacket on top of that and then your winter coat.”
“People really should keep their heads covered because that’s where majority of heat gets lost,” Engle added.
Wexler said moving can generate heat. But try to avoid sweating.
“If you are overheated and start to sweat, that lowers your body temperature and makes you more susceptible to cold injury,” he said. “You want to be able to adjust your layers, zip and unzip.”
Wexler also recommended staying hydrated because “dehydration can help promote cold injury.”
The young and elderly should be especially careful in the cold.
“Their ability to maintain core body temperature is harder than mid-age and younger adults,” he said. “Kids, especially babies, lose a disproportionate amount of heat from their head — that’s why you want to have a hat on their head when you’re out there. Older people are more at risk simply because it is more difficult to regulate our core body temperature as we get older.”
It’s also more difficult to maintain your core temperature if you are diabetic or taking decongestant antihistamines or certain blood pressure medications, Wexler said.
How to keep your car safe
When the temperature dips, getting behind the wheel can prove to be a challenge. Problems include dead car batteries, iced-over windshields, broken car locks and driving with no traction.
Audra Fordin, founder of Woman Auto Know and the owner of Great Bear Auto Repair in Queens, New York, provided these tips:
1. Before you hit the road, check under the hood.
“If it’s really cold outside, you want to make sure that your battery is going to be good in the freezing cold weather,” Fordin said. “If you see any snow or blue stuff that’s growing off your battery, that’s an indication you want to go to the shop to have your battery checked.”
2. Iced out windshields? Turn to your wallet for help.
“If you get to your car and can’t see, pull out a credit card, and you can just wipe that frost away,” Fordin said.
3. Fighting a stubborn car lock? Get sanitizing.
“If your lock is frozen, put the sanitizer on the key, and then put the key into the lock,” Fordin said.
4. If your car can’t gain traction, let your floor mat give an assist.
“Grab your floor mat, you’re going to put it underneath the wheel,” Fordin said. “That will give you enough traction to pull your car out and hit the road.”
Samara Heisz/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR, ERIN SCHUMAKER, EMILY SHAPIRO and IVAN PEREIRA, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 101.4 million people worldwide and killed over 2.1 million of them, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Here’s how the news is developing Friday. All times Eastern:
Jan 29, 8:43 am J&J single-shot vaccine 85% effective against severe COVID-19 disease
In another promising development for vaccine science, Johnson & Johnson announced Friday that its COVID-19 vaccine — a single shot tested against a complex barrage of newly emerged variants of the virus — is 66% effective at preventing symptomatic disease and 85% effective against preventing severe illness.
The U.S. pharmaceutical giant said the vaccine is also safe to take. Volunteers experienced mild reactions after the shot, with less than 10% experiencing fever, according to a company press release.
The full data package will be made publicly available and will be evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee sometime in mid- to late February.
The FDA has said it will consider a vaccine that’s more than 50% effective, and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine exceeds this threshold. An emergency use authorization could be given and people could start receiving shots before the end of February.
Jan 29, 8:26 am ‘We should be treating every infection as if it’s a variant,’ CDC director says
Americans should now assume there’s already more contagious variants of the novel coronavirus circulating in their communities, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I think we should be treating every infection as if it’s a variant,” Walensky told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview Friday on Good Morning America.
“That is the way we’re going to control this pandemic,” she added. “Quite honestly, we know that these viruses are going to mutate. They generally mutate to the advantage of the virus and that’s how we get these more dominant strains.”
Walensky’s remarks come a day after the United States confirmed its first cases of the B1351 variant, which was first identified in South Africa and has since spread to dozens of other countries.
“We had always been worried that they were here and we hadn’t yet detected them,” she said.
The B1351 variant was discovered in two people in South Carolina who were not in contact with one another and haven’t traveled recently, which concerns Walensky.
“So the presumption is here that they became infected from other people in the community and that there’s community spread of this variant,” she said.
Walensky explained that it “takes a while” for scientists to detect a variant.
“From the time of symptoms to somebody getting a test to that test being positive and to us being able to sequence it, that turnaround time could be up to 10 to 14 days,” she said.
Although the CDC has “done an enormous amount of scaling up of our surveillance of these variants,” Walensky said researchers are essentially starting from the ground up because “there has not been a public health infrastructure to track these variants.”
“There has not been money, resources to be able to do mass sequencing at the level of infection that we have in this country right now,” she said. “That is part of the American Rescue Plan, is to be able to use resources to finance a mass scale-up of surveillance for these variants.”
There are concerns that the variants wield increased transmissibility and mortality, or that existing treatments and vaccines won’t work as well against them.
“The current vaccines we’re still studying against these variants,” Walensky said. “What I will say though is we have a 95% efficacious vaccine against the current strain. Even if we have some diminution of that efficacy against the South Africa strain, I still think we need to really go ahead, push the vaccination, because this just is still yet another tool in our toolbox to fight this pandemic.”
Jan 29, 7:24 am Russia says it can supply Europe with 100 million doses of its vaccine
Russia said Friday it will be ready to supply Europe with enough doses of its COVID-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, for 50 million people in the second quarter of this year.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which is responsible for worldwide marketing of the vaccine, announced via Twitter that 100 million doses can be provided to the European Union — pending regulatory approval — once most of Russia’s population has been vaccinated.
After being developed by the state-run Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, Sputnik V was controversially registered by the health ministry in August before starting crucial Phase 3 trials, with Russia declaring itself the first in the world to register a COVID-19 vaccine.
The RDIF said the vaccine is now registered in 15 countries and that documents have been submitted to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for “rolling review,” which would mean that the drug regulator is reviewing clinical trial data on a rolling basis. However, last week, the EMA said in a statement that “currently Sputnik V is not undergoing a rolling review.”
Jan 29, 6:25 am Mexico overtakes India for third-highest COVID-19 death toll
Mexico now has the third-highest death toll from COVID-19 in the world.
According to real-time data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, Mexico has registered 155,145 fatalities from the disease since the pandemic began, overtaking India’s count of 154,010 deaths.
Mexico, a country of 127 million people, has confirmed more than 1.8 million cases of COVID-19. Whereas India, home to some 1.3 billion, has confirmed over 10.7 million cases, the second-most in the world, according to Johns Hopkins data.
Jan 29, 3:49 am US reports over 164,000 new cases
There were 164,665 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Thursday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
Thursday’s case count is far less than the country’s all-time high of 300,282 newly confirmed infections on Jan. 2, Johns Hopkins data shows.
An additional 3,872 fatalities from COVID-19 were registered nationwide on Thursday, down from a peak of 4,466 new deaths on Jan. 12, according to Johns Hopkins data.
COVID-19 data may be skewed due to possible lags in reporting over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend.
A total of 25,766,735 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 433,195 have died, according to Johns Hopkins data. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.
Much of the country was under lockdown by the end of March as the first wave of the pandemic hit. By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country’s cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up over the summer.
The numbers lingered around 40,000 to 50,000 from mid-August through early October before surging again to record levels, crossing 100,000 for the first time on Nov. 4, then reaching 200,000 on Nov. 27 before topping 300,000 on Jan. 2.
So far, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized two COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use — one developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and another developed by American biotechnology company Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. More than 24 million vaccine doses have been administered nationwide, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
(NEW YORK) — A Texas Army base and law enforcement authorities are investigating after 11 soldiers became sick after ingesting an unauthorized substance during a training exercise at Fort Bliss on Thursday.
Two of the soldiers remained in critical condition, Fort Bliss’ 1st Armored Division said in an update Friday morning.
The Fort Bliss’ 1st Armored Division initially said the soldiers became sick after ingesting an “unknown substance,” according to a statement released Thursday. On Friday, officials described the substance as “acquired outside of authorized food supply distribution channels,” though did not identify it further.
Those harmed include one warrant officer, two noncommissioned officers and eight enlisted members, officials said. All have been under observation at William Beaumont Army Medical Center since Thursday afternoon.
Officials at the military base, in cooperation with law enforcement officials, are continuing to investigate the incident, the updated release said. There is no threat to the public, officials said.
The 1st Armored Division — also known as “Old Ironsides”– is a renowned armored division, consisting of approximately 17,000 highly trained soldiers, according to the Army’s website.
ABC News’ Joshua Hoyos contributed to this report.
(COLUMBUS, Ohio) — The chief of police in Columbus, Ohio, is “stepping back” following the death of Andre Hill, an unarmed Black man who was shot and killed by a police officer last month.
The city is now conducting a national search to replace Chief Thomas Quinlan, Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther announced Thursday, who pointed to frustrations around reform efforts as the reason behind the change of command.
“It became clear to me that Chief Quinlan could not successfully implement the reform and change I expect and that the community demands,” Ginther said in a statement. “Columbus residents have lost faith in him and in the Division’s ability to change on its own. Chief Quinlan understood.”
Ginther continued that Quinlan “agreed to step back, so the city can move forward.”
Columbus Public Safety Director Ned Pettus also said that he and Ginther “decided to go in a new direction.”
“I look forward to continuing the critical work of reforming and strengthening the Division of Police,” he said in a statement. “The community we serve deserves nothing less.”
Quinlan will be staying on as deputy chief, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office confirmed with ABC News.
Quinlan, a 30-plus-year veteran of the Columbus Division of Police, was named chief of police in December 2019. The position is a five-year appointment. His probationary period was set to end Feb. 7, according to Columbus ABC affiliate WSYX.
“While I very much hoped to continue in that role, I respect the safety director’s decision, and the community’s need to go in a different direction,” Quinlan said in a statement. “We accomplished a lot in my time as chief. We implemented dozens of reforms geared toward accountability, transparency, and strengthening public trust. Someone else will now carry those priorities forward, and I will help and support them in any way I can.”
The police division has been scrutinized following the fatal shooting of Hill on Dec. 22 by an officer dispatched to a “non-emergency” disturbance call.
Adam Coy, the officer who shot Hill, did not turn on his body camera until after firing, authorities said. Body camera footage released earlier this month also appeared to show responding officers handcuff Hill before rendering any first aid.
Coy was fired by the city earlier this month after an investigation determined that his use of deadly force was not reasonable. Quinlan had called for his termination.
Deputy Chief Mike Woods will serve as interim chief while the city begins its national search for a permanent chief on an “expedited timeframe,” the mayor said. The search firm Ralph Andersen & Associates will help in identifying a permanent police chief.
In the coming weeks, the city will also be appointing members of a new Civilian Review Board that voters approved in November. The city has also set aside $4.5 million to fund new body-worn cameras.
“I want to assure Columbus residents that our commitment to change and reform will not wane as we seek the next leader of the Division of Police,” Ginther said. “I remain committed to meaningful, lasting police reform and confronting racism where it exists, advancing social justice so everyone in every neighborhood feels safe.”
ABC News’ Will Gretsky contributed to this report.
Oleksii Liskonih/iStockBy ERIN SCHUMAKER, ABC News
