US to buy 100M additional coronavirus vaccines

The administration of US President Joe Biden is planning to announce the purchase of 100 million additional coronavirus vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, according to reports on Wednesday.

Biden will direct the Department of Health and Human Services to make the purchase that is estimated to be available later this year, according to a report by The New York Times.

The president will meet later Wednesday with executives from Johnson & Johnson and Merck, which will help manufacture the vaccines amid a deal brokered by the White House.

Out of 123 million distributed doses in the US, 93.6 million have been administered as of early Tuesday, but just 32.1 million people, or 9.7% of the population, have received two doses, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

A recent poll, however, showed that one-quarter of the American population is unwilling to be vaccinated.

"Confidence in President Joe Biden's ability to get the outbreak under control has dipped since he first took office," Monmouth University said in the poll.

"Despite the recent increase in vaccinations, public expectations about when the country will get the outbreak under control have moved in a more pessimistic direction over the past few months," it added.

While 21% of Americans think they will be able to return to normal by summer, 40% anticipate normalcy by end of the year, and 27% say it will take longer than that. Nine percent believe it will never return to normal.

Among Johnson & Johnson that requires a single shot, the US also has vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

A separate poll showed, however, that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could be far less effective against the South Africa variant of the virus, B.1.351.

The study published in the journal, Nature, said "findings on B.1.351 are more worrisome," and it is "markedly more resistant to neutralization."

While there are 3,283 reported cases in 49 US states of the UK strain, B.1.1.7, 91 cases of the South African variant have been detected in 21 states, and the P.1 variant that emerged in Brazil has been spotted in 15 cases in nine states, according to the latest CDC data.

More than 29 million cases have been recorded in the US since the start of the pandemic, with an excess of 527,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.