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Biden: Americans to wear masks for first 100 days in office

WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (KUNA) -- US President-elect Joe Biden has said that after he takes office in January he will ask Americans to wear masks for 100 days.
"The first day I'm inaugurated to say I'm going to ask the public for 100 days to mask. Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days," Biden said in an interview on CNN, aired late on Thursday.
He added "I think we'll see a significant reduction ... if that occurs with vaccinations and masking to drive down the numbers considerably." Meanwhile, Biotechnology company, Moderna, has re-affirmed that it expects to have about 20 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine available in the US by the end of 2020.
The company said in a statement that it expects to have "between 100 million and 125 million doses available globally in the first quarter of 2021, with 85-100 million of those available in the US and 15-25 million of those available outside of the US." "These expected first quarter doses are inclusive within the 500 million to up to one billion doses that the company expects to manufacture globally in 2021," it noted.
On November 30, Moderna submitted a request for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and "conditional approval" from the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
Furthermore, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield accepted Thursday the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommendations on who gets the coronavirus vaccine first in the US.
The CDC said in a statement that Dr. Redfield would like to thank the ACIP "for all of their work in crafting these recommendations as interim guidance that both 1) health care personnel and 2) residents of long-term care facilities be offered COVID-19 vaccine in the initial phase of the vaccination program." "Dr. Redfield supports their recommendations and has signed the memo and accepted these interim recommendations," the statement affirmed.
This comes as the US surpassed 14 million coronavirus cases on Thursday as the nation continues to set record number of cases and hospitalizations. (end) si.rk