The latest on the coronavirus pandemic and vaccines

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he expects US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance for fully vaccinated people will be coming soon.

Fauci said that the CDC wants “to make sure they sit down, talk about it, look at the data and then come out with a recommendation based on the science.” 

Common sense tells you that you don’t have to be as stringent with Covid-19 public health measures once fully vaccinated, he said, but he wants firm recommendations from the CDC, “which I believe will be coming soon.”

“I believe you’re going to be hearing more of the recommendations of how you can relax the stringency of some of the things, particularly when you’re dealing with something like your own personal family when people have been vaccinated,” Fauci told CNN.

When asked about a timeline, Fauci said that he speaks about this with the team every day — and as recently as last night. 

“I hope that we will be able to answer the logical questions that people are asking about that,” Fauci said Tuesday. “I agree, they’re questions that we need to answer pretty soon because more and more people are going to be vaccinated, every single day there’ll be more and more people and they’re going to be asking that question.” 

Fauci said that he believes the totality of the doses is going to meet contractual agreements of having 100 million doses by late June or early July, saying “that will happen.” 

“What we’re seeing is that instead of being front-loaded with a number of doses that are coming out, it very likely will be backloaded,” he said. 

“It’s just a matter of what happened with their production capability and how they are now going to be revving up, and then soon after that, they’re going to have a lot of doses,” he said. “But, it’s not going to be front-loaded.”

Johnson & Johnson will testify Tuesday in front of the subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for the House Committee on Energy & Commerce that it can deliver enough doses of coronavirus vaccine by the end of March to vaccinate more than 20 million Americans against Covid-19. 

The Food and Drug Administration's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meets on Friday to discuss the request for emergency use authorization from Johnson & Johnson for its vaccine candidate.