Politico reports that HHS Secretary Azar on Sunday “defended the Trump administration’s vaccine plans and said distribution could begin in a matter of days pending approval by the FDA,” while Bloomberg reports he predicted, “all Americans who want to get a Covid-19 vaccine should be able to do so by the second quarter of next year.”

Slaoui suggests vaccine rollout could result in fewer deaths starting in January. The New York Times reports Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific advisor to Operation Warp Speed, on Sunday “laid out an ambitious timetable for the rollout of the first coronavirus vaccine in the United States, rebuking [Biden’s] criticism that there was ‘no detailed plan that we’ve seen.’” The Times reports Dr. Slaoui “said that residents of long-term care facilities will receive the first round of vaccinations by mid-January, perhaps even by the end of December,” which the Washington Post reports he “said…may start to have an effect on infection counts for ‘the most susceptible people’ in January and February.”

Some states defer initial COVID-19 vaccine priority decisions to healthcare providers. Politico reports, “States struggling to prioritize who should receive the initial coronavirus shots are handing off those critical decisions to health care providers, giving them less than two weeks to decide how to ration the scarce doses among their own employees.” On Tuesday, an expert panel advising the CDC “overwhelmingly recommended that the first doses go to health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, given their heightened risk for contracting the deadly virus.” However, the recommendations “aren’t binding, with the Trump administration giving states leeway to divide up the initial batches of life-saving shots,” and some states are “shifting the responsibility to the health care industry to make those challenging determinations, arguing that hospitals are better equipped to figure out who should be first in line.”

From the news release of the American Association for Justice.