WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Surgeon General Jerome Adams were on hand Monday at George Washington University Hospital to witness doctors and nurses get the first shots of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Five health care workers received initial doses of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, the first authorized in the country to combat COVID-19.
Azar called it a "momentous event" to develop a vaccine just over 11 months after the novel coronavirus first surfaced but said important work remains to protect Americans.
"We want to have fewer hospitalizations and we want to get our deaths down because every single death we are experiencing is a tragedy," Azar said. "We do not have herd immunity. The strategy for herd immunity in the United States is vaccine-induced herd immunity."