President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid advisory board member Dr. Atul Gawande says vaccine rollout will be "a Herculean operation."
“The biggest challenge is going to be both production and then getting it into people’s arms,” Gawande said about the vaccine rollout. “The whole chain of getting it out on those trucks, but then, the whole chain of getting them into hospitals.”
The FDA will approve emergency use authorization, which could be given in either a couple of hours or a couple of days.
According to Operation Warp Speed, loading boxes of vaccines into trucks will require 24 hours of prep time. This includes moving with 2.9 million doses sent to 636 distribution sites across the country. Hospitals will receive the vaccines first, then state facilities and pharmacy distribution centers, health clinics, and drug stores.
In an interview with WNBC, Mark Levine, Chair of the NYC Council Health Committee, said that the vaccine could be given to its first recipients next Wednesday or Thursday.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar reported that 20 million Americans “could be” vaccinated by the end of December and another 50 million “could be” by the end of January. He also said that “we expect” 100 million vaccinations by the end of February.
Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Mark McClellan stressed that Congress has a huge role in distributing Covid vaccines.
“Congress is considering another bill to provide assistance with vaccine distribution, with testing, with helping businesses that have been affected by this latest surge,” McClellan said in a Thursday evening interview on “The News with Shepard Smith. “Those steps are going to make the distribution go better, they’re going to help us get the surge in cases down faster, and that means significantly faster recovery, getting back to normal, getting back to business as usual.”
Gawande said that the federal government will help distribute the vaccine in less-populated areas across the country.
“Rural hospitals in the smaller settings, these are in packages of 975 doses, and those have to go to places that can do larger distributions, we’ll have to work on getting it down to the rural areas as fast as possible and I hope that the [Trump] administration is prepared to do that soon,” Gawande said.
The vaccine updates come after the U.S. suffered its deadliest day yet of the coronavirus pandemic on Wednesday. Over 21,000 Americans have died this month alone, based on a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data.
However, Gawande stressed that while the effectiveness of the vaccine gives him hope, it does not mean that country will be back to “normal” and that people can stop wearing masks.
“What we know is that the vaccine keeps people from getting sick with symptoms, and so that’s great when you have the vaccination, but we don’t know that it prevents you from carrying an asymptomatic infection that could infect others,” Gawande said. “People getting the vaccine will need to keep wearing a mask, and that’s going to be a challenge to convince them that for the benefit of others, they need to keep doing that.”
