The FDA will meet on December 10 to talk about approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and a week later on December 17 for Moderna’s. Last Friday, the first large shipment of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine arrived in Chicago and Moderna’s CEO believes they can begin vaccinations by December 21
In the best case scenario, just 22.5 million people in the United States will be immunized by the end of the year– Moderna states it has 20 million dosages and Pfizer 25 million, and both vaccines need 2 shots to work.
Today, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices ( ACIP) voted for the CDC to recommend that health care workers and citizens of long-term care centers must get the vaccine.
That decision follows the recommendation of specialists, such as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Only 63% of health care employees stated they would get the vaccine, according to a CDC study, reminiscent of the low swine influenza vaccination rates for health workers back in2009
The number of individuals require to get the vaccine for it to have an effect on the pandemic?
The very good news is that both vaccines appear to work very well– Moderna’s is 941% reliable at avoiding the illness and the Pfizer vaccine is 95% And when individuals in the study did get the virus, Moderna’s was 100?ficient at avoiding serious disease.
The very bad news is that a vaccine is no great unless it is really in people’s bodies, and the vaccine needs to be in a lot of individuals’s bodies.
The Majority Of specialists state we need to reach 60 to 70 percent immunity to break coronavirus transmission, and at a lot of, just 10% of the population has coronavirus antibodies today (and who understands the length of time they last or who those individuals are).
This becomes a math issue: at the very least, a 95%reliable vaccine needs to be offered to 63%of the population to raise the immunity by 60 percent (0.95 times 0.63).
That has to do with 207 million individuals. And don’t forget, they require 2 doses each. And we do not yet know if people will need a seasonal booster like the flu shot.
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So the length of time before the indication at your pharmacy states “COVID vaccines are readily available”?
The optimistic response is by April. That’s according to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Transmittable Illness. Alex Azar, the Health and Person Solutions Secretary, likewise anticipates vaccines to be generally readily available by the spring.
But there’s reason to be cynical. Vaccines won’t be extensively available unless we solve production and distribution issues that have been defined as logistical nightmares more than as soon as There are bottlenecks in vials and syringes and centers that can seal the vaccine into sterilized containers, according to a report earlier this month from the US Government Accountability Office. And while Moderna’s vaccine can be defrosted and kept for a month in a routine fridge, the Pfizer vaccine needs to be kept at -70 degrees Celsius (-94 Fahrenheit), while a lot of freezers only get to about -20 degrees Celsius. The wait on a freezer that can keep the Pfizer vaccine is currently six weeks. And the shots need to be cold throughout their journey: there need to be aircrafts and trucks geared up to bring these vaccines at extremely low temperature levels, implying lots and lots of dry ice
The path from the pharma factory to your arm goes like this: manufacturers make them and ship them to a distributor, then a supplier ships them to where you ‘d go to get the shots, such as a hospital or drug store. From here, things look a lot more clear.
As part of Operation Lightning speed, the CDC partnered with McKesson Corporation to disperse vaccines, while Pfizer has actually set up a distribution project of its own.
And earlier this month, the Department of Health and Person Services announced a partnership with nineteen pharmacy chains, consisting of CVS, Walgreens, and WalMart. That covers 60 percent of the nation’s drug stores, according to HHS.
So, after we make hundreds of millions of dosages of vaccines, produce an equivalent amount of vials and syringes, make and pack them with solidified carbon dioxide, equip trucks and planes to move them from A to B to C, purchase enough below-Antartic cold freezers and put them in healthcare facilities across the country, then it’s smooth cruising. In other words: don’t discard your masks. It’s going to be a while.
Jason Silverstein
Jason Silverstein is a Lecturer and the Writer-in-Residence at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Global Health and Social Medication.
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