Moncef Slaoui, Operation Warp Speed’s Chief Science Advisor, said that the U.S. will be back to ‘normal’ by summer 2021.
“We hope that we would have vaccinated 70% to 80% of the U.S. population by May or June of 2021, so I would hope that by summer, we should be substantially back to normal,” Moncef Slaoui said in an interview on “The News with Shepard Smith”.
Data from the Covid Tracking Project showed that there were 88,000 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 on Tuesday while deaths are on the rise. The U.S. posted over 2,100 deaths Tuesday, the most deaths since May, based on a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data.
Two weeks after Thanksgiving, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will deliberate on approving Pfizer’s vaccine. The government aims to distribute 6.4 million doses to communities throughout the country.
According to Slaoui, immunizing all Americans will be a “challenge” but he finds it feasible. “People need to know that every year between 140 million to 180 million doses of flu vaccine are produced, distributed, and inoculated in the U.S. population in a period that goes between the month of August and the month of, maybe, January,” he said. “So, we may be doubling that number over the period of time, but it’s not from scratch, which was very different from the testing.”
Host Shepard Smith mentioned that convincing people about the safety of a vaccine is another challenge. A recent Gallup Poll indicated that only 58% of Americans said they would get a coronavirus vaccine.
“It’s a great concern and really it’s very unfortunate that the political context in which the development of this vaccine took place has exacerbated the hesitancy and the lack of trust that comes from the fact that we went very fast,” Slaoui said.
Slaoui stressed that scientists did not “start from a blank piece of paper” and were able to jump off of 10 to 15 years of development work that happened around the platform technologies in which the vaccines are made.
He added that while it takes six to seven years to come up with a vaccine, most of the work had been started with past years of research. The big number of participants in the Covid vaccine clinical trials also helped speed up the process, Slaoui said.
“We will know more about these vaccines and their efficacy and safety than the ‘average’ vaccines in the short term,” Slaoui said. “What we will not know very much about is their safety in the long-term, just because the trials had to be conducted fast, and it is important that we immunize people. We have 2,000 people dying every day.”
Slaoui noted there was a meticulous system of surveillance that can monitor people once the population begins taking the vaccines. Slaoui furthered that if there was any sign of long-term complications, those will be responded to “immediately.”
“Please keep your ears open and your mind open, listen, and then judge on the facts and the data,” Slaoui. said. “I feel confident that if we do that, most Americans will agree to be vaccinated. 95% efficacy is insurance against this pandemic.”
