Coronavirus updates: 1st vaccines now on the way to all 50 US states

Two main trucks left the Pfizer facility on Sunday morning, the company said.

A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 71.5 million people and killed over 1.6 million worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.


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Argentina to start vaccinations with Russia's Sputnik V

Argentina announced it will begin administering doses of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine later this month.

"When the Russian vaccine is in Argentina, the first person to get it will be me,” President Alberto Fernandez said. “I have no doubt in the quality of the vaccine.”

Russia on Saturday began vaccinations with Sputnik V, which hasn't yet gone through the late-stage trials required in the U.S.


New Hampshire house speaker dies from virus

The speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, Richard “Dick” Hinch, has died from COVID-19 at the age of 71, the state’s attorney general said.

Hinch was just elected speaker last week.

ABC News’ Ben Stein contributed to this report.


HHS officials acknowledge staffing struggle

Jonathan Greene, deputy assistant secretary for operations and resources at the Department of Health and Human Services, acknowledged in a briefing call that the agency is not able to provide the number of health care workers states are requesting.

HHS and FEMA have been "very judicious" in using and moving health care workers, providing 300 to 400 nationwide, which matches the number deployed during the first surge in the spring, Greene said. Fewer were deployed over the summer, mimicking the case curve.

About 3,100 can be deployed nationally, but Greene admitted the system is designed more for situations like hurricanes than for pandemics.

“It works less well when we're talking about a pandemic where everyone needs all of these providers all at once. And certainly when we activate and deploy these people and take them out of their full-time jobs and put them somewhere else, it reduces the capacity in the places where they come from,” he said.

Greene said the agency has encouraged the use of non-traditional health care providers in order "to bridge the gap."

ABC News' Sarah Kolinovsky contributed to this report.


Ellen DeGeneres tests positive

Ellen DeGeneres said Thursday that she’s tested positive for COVID-19 and is “feeling fine.”

“Anyone who has been in close contact with me has been notified, and I am following all proper guidelines,” the talk show host said.


Operation Warp Speed chief says he doesn't know what executive order Trump is signing

The chief science adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government's initiative to expedite vaccine development, said he doesn't know what vaccine-related executive order President Donald Trump is expected to sign on Tuesday.

"Frankly, I don't know and, frankly, I'm staying out of this. I can't comment," Dr. Moncef Slaoui told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview Tuesday on "Good Morning America."

When pressed on the matter, Slaoui added: "Our work is, you know, rolling. We have plans. We feel that we can deliver the vaccines as needed, so I don't exactly [know] what this order is about."

Trump is expected to discuss the order at a COVID-19 vaccine summit to be held at the White House later Tuesday, multiple White House officials told reporters during a background briefing on Monday evening. While it's not entirely clear on how exactly the order would work, the move is designed to prevent the U.S. government from shipping any vaccine doses it has purchased to aid foreign countries until all the needs within the United States are met.

White House officials also denied reports that the Trump administration turned down an offer last summer to purchase an additional 400 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and that the companies now may not be able to provide more of their vaccine to the United States until June 2021 because they have committed those doses to other countries.

When asked about the matter, Slaoui explained Operation Warp Speed's strategy in securing vaccine doses.

"We selected six different vaccines to build a portfolio to manage the risk that some may work and some may not work, but also to ensure that as more than one would work that we would accumulate vaccine doses from this portfolio of vaccines," he said. "If somebody came to us and said, let's buy more of this vaccine or that vaccine, no one reasonably would buy more from any one of those vaccines because we didn't know which one would work and which one may be better than the other. Once the vaccine's performance becomes known is the right time, given the strategy we've taken, to go and order more vaccine doses, which we may be doing. And frankly, the constructive thing to do if one of the suppliers has challenges producing enough vaccine doses is to roll our sleeves and help ensure that capacity can be increased."

Slaoui said he's confident the U.S. government will be getting vaccines to Americans who need them "as soon as possible" and that plans are "still on track."

"We will work with Pfizer to try and increase capacity and have those vaccines available," he said. "We have two more vaccines from J&J and AstraZeneca that will be completing their Phase 3 trials in January and most likely, I hope, be approved for use in February. We have tens of millions of doses from those vaccines, you know, participating to the volume of vaccines we need to immunize the U.S. population as we promised, all of it by the middle of the year 2021 and that's still on track."

Slaoui said Operation Warp Speed has a meeting with President-elect Joe Biden's transition team scheduled for Thursday.

"We look forward to, you know, sharing all the information and working together," he said. "Our objective has always been outside of politics and making sure we make available these vaccines for the U.S. people, and that's what we're doing."

ABC News' Ben Gittleson, John Parkinson and Eric Strauss contributed to this report.