There's good Covid-19 news, including a third vaccine's approval. But don't ease up on safety measures, Fauci warns

(CNN)It's easy to get caught up in all the good news about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Vaccine advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unanimously voted Sunday to recommend the distribution of a third vaccine for Americans 18 and older: the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

And for the first time since early November, fewer than 50,000 patients are hospitalized with Covid-19.

Along with that, there's been a decrease in new cases and deaths since the abysmal January surge.

Despite that progress, Dr. Anthony Fauci warns some Americans are easing up on safety measures too soon -- threatening the same post-dip surges we suffered in 2020.

"Just look historically at the ... early spring of 2020 or the summer of 2020, when we started to pull back prematurely. We saw the rebound," said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

That false sense of security and rebound led to another wave of shutdowns last year.

But this year, Americans face a new challenge: the increased spread of troubling variant strains -- including some that appear to be homegrown.

That's why health experts say Americans who want to get life back to normal must keep physical distancing -- and get vaccinated as soon as they're able to.

A 1-dose vaccine could save lives and costs, CDC says

With the new Johnson & Johnson approval, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky officially signed off on the recommendation Sunday.

Distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will begin Sunday night, according to senior administration officials who also cautioned that the amount of vaccine made available will be uneven throughout the month of March.

"Starting tonight, 3.9 million doses of J&J will be distributed across all channels, states, tribes, territories and pharmacies and community health centers," an official said in a briefing call Sunday night. "Those J&J doses will be delivered as early as this Tuesday morning."

The official also said that Johnson & Johnson communicated with the White House "that the weekly supply will be limited for the next couple of weeks after the initial distribution."

"The initial distribution is nearly four million doses of J&J. That's the entirety of J&J's current inventory," The official said. "We do not expect any additional deliveries next week and we expect deliveries to be uneven during the weeks of March."

The vaccine was given emergency use authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration on Saturday. An FDA analysis found the vaccine safe and effective.

It's the third coronavirus vaccine to win emergency use authorization, after Pfizer/BioNTech's and Moderna's vaccines.

A White House official said all three vaccines will be distributed evenly across all channels, but stressed that that does not mean that every vaccination site will have every vaccine.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine can be kept at normal refrigerator temperatures for three months and -- unlike the two other vaccines -- requires only one dose, something that committee members said would make it easy to distribute and administer.

The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices did not make any specific recommendations for which groups should have priority for the vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccine arm.

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