First Covid-19 Vaccine Could Arrive in US Early December

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• The first coronavirus vaccine may likely be out and available to American front-line health workers and high-risk groups in early December, Huffington Post reports.
• Pfizer has reportedly applied to the FDA for approval for emergency use of its COVID vaccine which has a 95% efficacy rate. 
• “Operation Warp Speed” adviser Dr. Moncef Slaoui anticipated that the application will be approved one to two days following the FDA’s review of the request on Dec. 10. 

The nation’s first COVID-19 vaccines could be made available to American healthcare workers by Dec. 11, Huffington Post reports. 

According to the news outlet, pharmaceutical company Pfizer submitted its application for approval to the FDA following preliminary data that the candidate vaccine is 95 percent effective. The FDA Advisory is slated to review the request on Dec. 10. 

Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser for Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” told CNN that it’s likely that the application for emergency use will be approved within a day or two of regulatory consent in mid-December.   

“Our plan is to be able to ship vaccines to the immunization sites within 24 hours of the approval so hopefully, the first people will be immunized across the United States,” said Slaoui. 

The first people likely to receive the vaccine include medical professionals and front-line” emergency medical personnel as well as the most vulnerable groups such as the elderly. 

Additionally, Slaoui said that the White House plans to immunize 20 million people in December, followed by 30 million in each of the succeeding months. Children, he said, are set to receive treatment by mid-2021. 

But first, Americans have to agree to be vaccinated. On Tuesday, a Gallup poll revealed that 58 percent of Americans agreed to get vaccinated with a coronavirus vaccine while 42 percent said they wouldn’t.

“I’m very, very concerned about the hesitancy as it exists,” Slaoui told ABC earlier on Sunday, adding that his family would gladly receive the treatment, given that the vaccines have been developed as “thoroughly and as scientifically as ever”. 

Furthermore, the 95 percent efficacy rate of the vaccine means roughly 70 percent of the population needs to be inoculated for the immunity to work. 

“That is likely to happen somewhere in the month of May―or something like that―based on our plans,” Slaoui added. 

But Dr. Anthony Fauci doesn’t think that everything will be “normal” by May. 

“You can have a highly efficacious vaccine and only a relatively small 40, 50% of people get vaccinated, you’re not going to get the herd immunity you need,” he told CBS. 

“What we do need is we need to get as many people as possible vaccinated,” he said. 

Source: Yahoo News