United States health secretary, Alex Azar, on Friday said that the country could start injecting the first Americans with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine by Monday. Azar told news channels that final details were being ironed out, after an expert committee convened by regulators voted to grant the two-dose regimen emergency approval for people aged 16 and over, news agency AFP reported.

Azar said that authorities were working with Pfizer on logistics and “could be seeing people get vaccinated Monday, Tuesday of next week.”

The USFDA had issued a statement last night saying it had told Pfizer it would now “rapidly work toward finalisation and issuance of an emergency use authorisation.”

“So, it’s very close. It’s really just the last dotting of I’s and crossing of T’s,” he added.

Those outstanding matters include getting a fact sheet ready for doctors, Azar told Fox Business.

Once the vaccine receives an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed program will oversee its distribution to thousands of sites across the country.

Before that happens, a committee from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also has to recommend the vaccine, then the agency itself has to accept that recommendation.

The first of these meetings takes place on Friday and the second on Sunday, but they are at this stage viewed as pro forma.

Thursday’s expert committee voted 17 in favor, four against, with one abstention, on the matter of approving Pfizer’s vaccine, which a clinical trial has shown to be 95 %.

Next week, an FDA committee will meet to consider a second vaccine, developed by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health.

The US hopes to immunise 20 million people this month, 100 million by February, and the whole population by June.

Long-term care facility residents and health care workers are at the front of the line.