And yesterday’s news was that the federal govt expects to buy another 200 million doses (100m each from Pfizer and Moderna) increasing the “by this summer” purchase of vaccine to 600m doses, or enough to immunize 300 million people, about the adult population of the US. Assuming there will be some waste, but that some people will refuse to be vaccinated, that’s enough doses.
And the J&J and Astrozeneca will likely have vaccines approved in the US in the not-so-distant future.
I mean, I’ll believe it when i get my second shot (I’m near the end of the list) but the recent news suggests our govt is using emergency powers to get us vaccine.
The J&J vaccine should have Phase 3 results released in the next couple of days. Then EUA 2-3 weeks after that. It’ll make a big difference because it’s a single dose vaccine and can be stored in normal refrigeration. It’ll probably go to more rural and remote areas that don’t have the ability to store the current approved vaccines. Basically, in the future, if you live in a city, you’ll probably get the 2 dose vaccine, if you live in the sticks, you’ll probably get the single dose vaccine.
And don’t forget, the Biden administration inherited zero vaccine distribution plans, so they’re starting from nothing. I’d imagine it might follow the same pattern as testing. In my state, testing really ramped up about 2 months, then again after another 2 or 3 months. We might see the same with vaccination. There are a lot of technical challenges. A lot.
Zero plans is false. I think you can fault Trump admin for not having an adequate plan, but it isn’t entirely a federal thing, either. I don’t doubt a president who gave it the right amount of attention could have done better.
A lot of talk about distribution and and production. Hard to say what could have been done to produce more, but it makes sense that that would be the problem. Only so much throwing money at a problem near the end of a process can speed things up.
I’d like to distinguish distribution from administration though they’re similar. Distribution has been going fine, from a pure perspective of shipping the vaccine.
Administration is what I’d like to see get discussed more. IMO no reason to have vaccines distributed but not administered. We should be closer to 80-90% of distributed vaccines being administered, but are no where close.
I think there are plenty of things to criticize Trump admin about without needless exaggeration.
I will expand with more quotes from the article:
“We’re certainly not starting from scratch, because there is activity going on in the distribution,” Fauci told reporters during an appearance in the White House briefing room.
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Operation Warp Speed was responsible for allocating and delivering vaccines to states, but the responsibility for the “last mile” of distribution, including getting shots into arms, was delegated to the states.
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But despite the complaints, states are still averaging close to 900,000 vaccinations a day.
Biden has promised 100 million vaccinations in his administration’s first 100 days, but many experts have noted that the pace will have to be much faster in order to reach herd immunity by the fall.
So the pace as of 1/21 (article publish date) was about what Biden (initially) promised over the next 100 days. If it were just 1m/day that would be a 11% improvement over current rates. He has since increased the target to 150m/100 days. I hope it will be higher, and expect it will.
I would have liked the formatting to look better (in this case make clear what was in the article vs my words), but still learning this board.
I’m glad the vaccine production was fast tracked and all, but am I alone in thinking that “Operation Warp Speed” sounds like it was named by a 7th grader? I can’t help but roll my eyes when I hear it referred to.
You’ll be happy to know the name “Operation Warp Speed” has been retired. I mean, if you choose a name like that and don’t name Shatner as your spokesperson, you’ve failed on day one.
I also look forward to reports from the conservative media saying the end of the pandemic is due to Trump because he was president during the vaccine development. But anyway.
Are cases dropping like a rock? I haven’t been tracking lately. Oh sure, dropping, yeah. Like a rock, though? Not quite.
Also, so few Americans have received their second dose, it’s unlikely the drop has much to do with the vaccine at this time. My guess is that the people who are being vaccinated first aren’t the people who are primarily responsible for spreading the virus. So I don’t think there will be a big impact on new cases at first. The hospitalization and death rates will start dropping first.
I look forward to fox news articles that are about tweets that say that covid was a liberal hoax and the fact that it went away soon after the fake election is proof.
The initial receivers are first-responders and high-risk health workers. I don’t know how many people that is, but they are definitely spreaders.
I assume the case rate is mostly dropping because we simply peaked (like previous times), due to a mix of herd immunity and social distancing resuming after the holidays, and the vaccine is helping that drop. But there really is quite a difference between 20% herd immunity and 25% herd immunity. You have to remember this thing both grows and dies on an exponential scale. My random guess is that it would take at least a month before new policy could result in a significantly different vaccine total, and we’ll be down to 50k/day and still dropping with new hospitalizations very low.
The local nursing home did the second round of shots last Wednesday. I think that is common in my state. We should see a drop in deaths by the end of February.
Cases may be up as the “more contagious” UK variant gets here.
I feel like high risk HC workers have more exposure, but also follow the CDC guidelines to the T. ICU nurses probably don’t go to crowded bars or parties after their shift.
If you wanted to vaccinate the spreaders, not the at-risk, you’d start at college campuses.
I thought the Operation Warp Speed was aptly named. I mean, there are about thirty million things Trump did wrong, but he DID get three vaccines approved for use by the general public in really record time. That’s a bona fide accomplishment. It doesn’t begin to negate all of the other truly terrible things he did, but it is a bona fide accomplishment, and I actually kind of like the name.
What’s needed now is a plan for actually getting needles into arms. One part of that is that they need a plan for using up unused doses that were thawed for people who didn’t show, or thawed by accident. My hairdresser has mastered the art of the cancellation list… I’m not sure why this is so difficult. But it needs to become official government policy.
Every dose is sacred, every dose is great. If a dose is wasted, twig gets quite irate…
It would be really nice if there were some sort of formal waiting list procedure for unused doses at the end of the day. Instead we have so-called Vaccine Hunters who wait all day at pharmacies and other vaccination sites hoping there are extra doses at the end of the day. Totally inefficient.