COVID-19 vaccines and treatments could go to private market this summer, White House official says
CBSN
The supply of free treatments and vaccines for COVID-19 purchased by the federal government could end as soon as this summer, the White House's top pandemic official said Thursday, as the Biden administration prepares to transition the medicines to the private market.
"All I can say, because I literally don't know, we don't have the specific dates, is that it's going to happen sometime over the summer into early fall. And you'll see that transition and we'll kind of give people as much notice as we can possibly give," Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House's COVID-19 Response Coordinator, told a webinar hosted by the University of California San Francisco.
His timeline echoes the one recently laid out by Pfizer executives. The company told shareholders this week they predicted to be able to begin selling their Comirnaty COVID vaccine and Paxlovid pills "at commercial prices" to Americans through the private market in the second half of this year.
Two more black-footed ferrets have been cloned from the genes used for the first clone of an endangered species in the U.S., bringing to three the number of slinky predators genetically identical to one of the last such animals found in the wild, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Wednesday.
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