12-30-20: It's become increasingly clear that time objectives for widespread distribution will not have a chance. In a dire emergency, widespread pandemic, the goal should have been to impart the most immunity on the most people as quickly as possible. The 2 shot dynamic process, doubles the time and defeats that #1 objective.
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12-19-2020: A feature with the distribution of these vaccinations bothers me.
It's great that we want to maximize protection with 2 shots and this would be a wonderful idea in an ideal world...........if it didn't also mean that it will take twice as long for most people to get vaccinated.
A limiting factor for most people in their wait to get vaccinated will be the amount of time that it takes to give people in front of them 2 shots, instead of 1 shot which will also be dependent on supplies. It will basically use up twice as much of the vaccinations and take twice as long to do 2 shots as it does 1 shot.
Somebody who could be vaccinated in 3 months, for instance, if they were giving out just 1 shot/person, initially..........will have to wait 6 months if they do 2 shots/person for people ahead of them. Somebody who would get the 1 shot in 4 months, will have to wait 8 months if getting 2 shots. If we could get everybody mostly protected with 1 shot in 6 months...........it will take an entire year with 2 shots.
I understand their reasoning because they are looking at the long run, big picture to maximize the effectiveness of the shots in the individuals that get them but its wrong in a pandemic. This is not the ideal big picture situation. It's a dire human killing emergency that requires adjusting protocol to give the most people, the most protection ASAP.
This is how we will establish herd immunity the fastest.
Analogy: Let's say that you were having a hypothetical fuel system problem with your car. If the mechanic told you that he was booked for months out and he could do most of the problem in 3 months but it "might not" entirely fix the problem with no warranty on the results but would, for sure make it MUCH better and you might need to come back several months later to have it finished so that it would be fixed for good.
Or you could wait an extra 3 months, (double the time at 6 months) and have the entire fuel system overall that he recommends with a warranty on the results.
Most people might opt to wait an extra 3 months and have it done right.
But what if he told you that this fuel system problem had a good chance of causing your car to explode and burst into flames at speeds of greater than 50mph? Getting it mostly fixed in 3 months, would eliminate most of that risk.
A car like that would be a "death machine", until it got fixed. The choice would be a no brainer. Get the car in ASAP so you are no longer driving around in the death machine.
Doing 2 shots before most people can get one is like having a couple hundred million people walking around in potential "human" death machines for twice as long as they need to, so that when they get "fixed" it will be the permanent fix.
I can understand doing this for health care workers and the extremely vulnerable members in our society during the first month or so but after that it's best to get EVERYBODY some protection ASAP.
Latest COVID numbers/graphs: https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/61206/
Tool tells when you may be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine.....and more COVID news:
Vaccines can prevent symptoms, but some can also keep people from spreading infection. That’s critical, and no one knows if the new vaccines do it.
https://www.wired.com/story/does-the-astrazeneca-vaccine-also-stop-covid-transmission/
The problem is, a Covid-19 vaccine that only prevents illness—which is to say, symptoms—might not prevent infection with the virus or transmission of it to other people. Worst case, a vaccinated person could still be an asymptomatic carrier. That could be bad. More younger people tend to get the virus, but more older people tend to die from it; socioeconomic status and ethnicity also have an impact on death rates. Some people have relatively light symptoms; other people have symptoms that hang on for months. And perhaps most importantly, a vaccine is the only way to reach herd immunity without a bloodbath. As politicized as the notion has become, herd immunity is essentially the sum of direct protection—what you might get if you’re vaccinated—and indirect protection, safety afforded by the fact that people around you aren’t transmitting the disease to you because they either already had the disease themselves or because they got vaccinated against it. If vaccinated people can still be asymptomatic spreaders, that means less indirect protection for the herd.
Which means nobody yet has transmission data beyond AstraZeneca’s vague hints. That’s suboptimal. The millions of people who may well start getting vaccinated as soon as December will also be a kind of Phase IV trial, an aftermarket test group in which scientists can observe what the vaccine does to transmission of the disease in the real world. “I do think we’re going to need that information over time,” Lee says. “But I feel like in this part of the pandemic, given the context we’re living in right now, it does feel like making vaccination a key component of protection of the population is going to be an important tool.”
This link is loaded with wonderful information:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2020-11/COVID-04-Dooling.pdf
As recently as mid-December, the Trump administration touted an ambitious goal: 20 million COVID-19 vaccinations by the end of the year.
But now, days before the end of the year, it appears that the actual number of vaccinations will fall significantly short of that mark.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracker shows only about 2 million people have been vaccinated so far. That figure is likely an undercount, given there is a lag in reporting the data, but it is still well short of 20 million.
Administration officials said Tuesday that they are still on track to allocate 20 million doses to states by the end of the year, but that is different from those doses actually making it all the way into people’s arms.
Experts are pressing the government to ramp up the pace, saying states need more support.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed delivers vaccines to the states, but the “last mile” of getting vaccines into people’s arms has largely been left to states to figure out at a time when state health departments are strapped for cash and overwhelmed.
“States were kind of left on their own, like so many things across the course of this pandemic,” said Josh Michaud, associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “What we're seeing is the fruits of that patchwork approach.”
President-elect Joe Biden, who has avoided day-to-day confrontations with President Trump, on Tuesday did criticize the administration for moving too slowly on vaccinations.
“The Trump administration's plan to distribute vaccines is falling far behind,” he said, vowing that as president he would direct a “much more aggressive effort, with more federal involvement.”
The Trump administration had a “misperception” that “shipping the vaccine was success,” instead of following all the way through to vaccinate people, said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, which represents states’ vaccination officials.
She added that the projection of 20 million vaccinations by the end of the year was “way off to start with.”
“I don’t know why that was said, honestly,” she said.
Trump administration officials themselves are acknowledging the 20 million vaccinations figure will not be met.
“Exactly how fast the ramp up of immunizations, shots in arm, is happening is slower than we thought it would be,” Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, said at a press briefing last week, adding that states should tell them their “asks” on what they need to accelerate the effort.
“That objective is unlikely to be met, 20 million people with a shot in arm [by the end of the year],” he said.
Some experts said more planning should have been done ahead of time and warn that the vaccine effort could match the disarray of the early testing effort that put the United States on the backfoot in the opening months of the pandemic.
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, tweeted that he is “incredibly frustrated.”
“There appears to be no investment or plan in the last mile,” he wrote. “No effort from Feds to help states launch a real vaccination infrastructure. Did the Feds not know vaccines were coming? Shouldn't planning around vaccination sites, etc not have happened in October or November?”
States were left with only small amounts of funding to prepare for vaccine distribution for months while Congress remained deadlocked over an aid package.
President Trump finally signed into law the relief package on Sunday, which provides an infusion of $8.75 billion for vaccine distribution.
“That money will certainly help,” Michaud said. “It would have helped even more six months ago.”
As recently as Dec. 13, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was striking a more upbeat note on vaccination numbers.
Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if the administration still expected to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of December, Azar replied, “Oh sure, yes,” later repeating “20 million vaccinations this month.”
In a statement on Tuesday, Michael Pratt, chief communications officer for Operation Warp Speed, stuck to a narrower claim about 20 million doses being allocated to states — but not all actually administered to people yet.
“These doses are being distributed at states’ direction to the American people as quickly as they are available and releasable, and the rapid availability and distribution of so many doses — with 20 million first doses allocated for distribution just 18 days after the first vaccine was granted emergency use authorization — is a testament to the success of Operation Warp Speed,” he said.
Hannan, of the state vaccination managers, said stronger communication with the federal government about allocations and other issues would be helpful. Another way to speed up vaccinations would be to open them up to more people, given that right now vaccinations are targeted at health care workers and nursing home residents.
“You're going to have states open it up even though they’re still vaccinating health care workers because they don’t want vaccine sitting on shelves,” she said.
Gen. Gustave Perna, the chief operating officer for Operation Warp Speed, apologized earlier this month for a “miscommunication” with states over their vaccine allocations.
Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases expert, gave Perna credit for making that acknowledgement and said he expects an “increase in momentum” in the vaccination effort in January.
“We certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December,” Fauci said on CNN on Tuesday, saying the sooner vaccines can get from the top priority groups to the general population, the better.
“When you get to the point where you can essentially say everybody and anybody who wants to be vaccinated, can be vaccinated, that's when you really turn around the dynamics of the outbreak,” he said.
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Get N95 masks ASAP!
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Started by metmike - Dec. 21, 2020, 7:27 p.m.