Health, defense departments give update on Operation Warp Speed, COVID-19 vaccine distribution

Nurse Melissa Valentin shows a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to be applied to medical personnel at the Ashford Presbyterian Community Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2020. After a first lot of vaccines arrived to the island the first in line to be inoculated are health workers, emergency responders, hospital employees and those who live or work in shelters or nursing homes. (AP Photo / Carlos Giusti) (AP)

WASHINGTON(This event has ended. Click here for more stories about the COVID-19 vaccine.)

The Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense are expected to hold a briefing on Operation Warp Speed and the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine.

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The briefing will be livestreamed in this article at 8:45 a.m., but delays are possible. If there is not a livestream available, check back at a later time.

Hundreds of more hospitals around the country began dispensing COVID-19 shots to their workers in a rapid expansion of the U.S. vaccination drive Tuesday, while a second vaccine moved to the cusp of government authorization.

Packed in dry ice, shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine began arriving Tuesday at more than 400 additional hospitals and other distribution sites.

The first 3 million shots are being strictly rationed to front-line health workers and nursing home patients, with hundreds of millions more shots needed over the coming months to protect most Americans.

The rollout provided a measure of encouragement to exhausted doctors, nurses and other hospital staffers around the country.

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About the Authors:

Rebecca Salinas is an award-winning digital journalist who joined KSAT in 2019. She reports on a variety of topics for KSAT 12 News.