COVID vaccines: U.S. hits milestone, half of adults have at least one shot

Happy Monday, readers.

Some welcome news on this spring day: Every state, as well as Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, has met President Biden’s April 19 deadline for extending COVID vaccine eligibility to all U.S. adults (those aged 16 and over). Oh, and more than half of American adults 18 or older have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

If you want to take a more eagle-eyed view, there have been: More than 211 million vaccine doses administered to date; 40% of the overall population has received at least one shot; and more than one in four of the entire population is fully vaccinated. That number climbs to 33% if you’re just considering the 18-and-over crowd. An average of 3.2 million doses are being administered per day.

It’s been a remarkable ramp-up. But public health experts warn that vigilance remains key as more contagious variants begin to rear their heads.

That means a continued focus on social distancing and masking in public spaces. After all, a fully vaccinated individual may still be able to pass coronavirus to someone who isn’t vaccinated and potentially more vulnerable. And daily reported cases have actually been climbing, reaching about 67,000 per day over the past week.

Cases are a lagging indicator, so we’ll have to keep an eye out for whether or not hospitalizations and deaths spike as well in the coming weeks. But ultimately, an immunization campaign is a balancing act, and public health officials agree: Get vaccinated if you can, but still stay on alert so that we can all get back to a more normal life.

Read on for the day’s news.

Sy Mukherjee
sy.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy

DIGITAL HEALTH

A health care system takes on phishing. Pretty much anyone with an email account has had to deal with the scourge that is the phishing email. It's one of the most common nuisances of cybersecurity and IT departments around the globe dedicate significant resources to containing it. But such threats are particularly harmful to one of the most delicate pieces of information infrastructure: health care IT. And Pennsylvania-based Geisinger appears to have made significant strides in fighting this type of cyber mischief, according to an interview the health system's cybersecurity expert gave to Healthcare IT News. David Stellfox and his team, through anti-phishing training, helped cut the click rate on these malicious emails in half. His secret sauce? "Visibility and engagement." (Healthcare IT News)

INDICATIONS

Manufacturing makes the money. A vaccine begins with innovation. But to proceed to mass commercialization, it helps to have a vast, existing network to scale up your product. That's at the heart of Bernstein analyst Ronny Gal's projections on future revenues from mRNA-based therapeutics (the kind of technology at the hear of Pfizer's and Moderna's COVID vaccines). Gal believes that Pfizer and BioNTech's extensive manufacturing network (Moderna is more reliant on outside sources, as I've previously reported) will lift its mRNA vaccines business to $24 billion this year compared with $14 billion for Moderna. (FiercePharma)

THE BIG PICTURE

Following the evolving coronavirus strains. The Biden administration has announced it will allocate $1.7 billion to trace new and emerging coronavirus variants. The funds will go to the CDC, local and state governments, and other research institutes given the growing threat of the so-called U.K. variant, which is now the leading cause of new cases in the U.S. Of note? This is an infrastructure project, too. $300 million will be dedicated to building out a national bioinformatics platform that helps collect all the data from local genomic sequencing projects that identify new strains. President Biden has proposed similar data-sharing in other aspects of medicine, especially for cancer research. (NPR)