Here are seven updates about the COVID-19 vaccine over the past week:
1. It would take Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente more than four years to vaccinate all of its patients at the current pace the system is receiving doses from the federal government.
2. The federal government will send 1 million vaccine doses to about 6,500 retail pharmacies Feb. 11.
3. One dose of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine provided strong protection against COVID-19 in clinical trials when second doses were delayed by at least three months, according to a Lancet preprint published Feb. 2.
4. Peter Marks, MD, PhD, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said the agency is working to streamline the process for authorizing COVID-19 vaccines after they have been updated to protect against new variants of the novel coronavirus.
5. Here's what the CDC knows about the nation's first 13 million COVID-19 vaccine recipients.
6. Johnson & Johnson's single-shot vaccine is 66 percent effective in preventing moderate to severe COVID-19 cases, the drugmaker announced Jan. 29.
7. Pfizer said Jan. 27 that there is no need to develop additional versions of its vaccine to protect against variants of the coronavirus discovered in the U.K. and South Africa, as studies have shown that the variants have only "small effects" on the vaccine's efficacy.