The FDA's committee has recommended Moderna's vaccine.
The FDA will likely act on it tomorrow or over the weekend, approving.
Then we will have two, with Astra-Veneca coming around soon after, perhaps. Those plus the anti-body treatment may mean we can keep US deaths under 600,000, but I doubt it.
I would expect us to pass WWII in deaths about Jan 22, Civil War in deaths in 4 months, and the 1918 pandemic by the end of May, unless our efficiency of getting people vaccinated improves a ton.
Note that my predictions are more pessimistic than IHME's, but that I view them as conservative (2,500 deaths per day on average) - before the end of March seems more likely for passing the Civil War and April 17th for the 1918 Spanish Flu (based on 3,000 deaths per day on average through that April date).
And even that feels too optimistic.
We do, now, have two vaccines approved, though one is only for 18+ and the other for 16+. We also have a new, faster spreading mutation of the virus and we don't yet know if
any of the vaccines works for it, but that is now being tested for the first two out of the gates.
IHME's prediction for Jan 22 deaths now aligns with mine. Their daily death average is now up to 2434 from Dec. 6 to April 1. I'm
only predicting 60,000 more deaths by April 1 than they are.
Kid wants to call that morbid.
Morbid is this jackass of a president making things worse while pretending to make things better now.
It is better to pass this stimulus package and get it moving with an additional package to follow than to kill this one in the hopes a better one can be negotiated later.