vaccine

In the early months of the vaccination campaign, Internet access was essential to the search for a vaccination appointment.

But given that more than 14 million people in the U.S. lack reliable access to high speed Internet, technology has been a barrier for some Americans.

Typically, if you get a COVID-19 vaccine that requires two doses, you should get two of the same vaccine. Two Pfizer shots, or two Moderna shots. Not one and then the other.

But in the future, that could change, either by necessity or by design.

This idea of using two types of vaccines isn't a new concept. It's known as heterologous vaccination, although there's a more colloquial term.

The Biden administration launched a website and text line on Friday to help people find COVID-19 vaccines near where they live. A national 1-800 hotline in dozens of languages will also soon be announced, according to a senior official from the Department of Health and Human Services.

There are a lot of ways Dr. Kent Bream would describe the lines of people waiting, sometimes for hours, for COVID-19 vaccines at his community health clinic in West Philadelphia. Eager. Impatient. Frustrated, even. But "hesitant" doesn't come to mind.

After a year of grim milestones, Sunday marked a hopeful statistic in America's fight against the coronavirus. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than half of all American adults have now gotten at least one vaccine dose.

All federal prison inmates will have the opportunity to receive a vaccine by mid-May, according to the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Michael Carvajal.

Vaccines have already been made available to all federal prison staff, he said, speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing Thursday.

More than 40,000 people incarcerated in federal prisons have received both doses of the vaccine, the bureau says, which is about a third of the people in BOP custody. Nearly 18,000 federal prison staff have been fully vaccinated.

After Gabby LaRochelle, 22, got her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, she reached out to her friends to make travel plans for this summer. She can't wait to get out of her house in Clarksburg, Md.

"So I was the one who was like, 'we need to hang out, we need to hang out, we need to hang out,' " she says.