Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday that as many as 20 million people could get coronavirus vaccinations around the end of the year.
He said that by that time there could be as many as 25 million doses of vaccine available from Pfizer and 15 million doses available from Moderna. The vaccination takes two shots so that would mean 20 million people could get protection.
He said it could happen by the end of December, or early January if the timeline slips a bit. “That’s what we’re anticipating and hoping,” he said in an interview at the STAT News 2020 Summit.
Meanwhile, the chief executive of Pfizer revealed in the same online event that the pharmaceutical giant is “very close” to submitting a request to the US Food and Drug Administration for authorization to distribute the companys vaccine to some people on an emergency basis.
Fauci said in an interview with STAT’s Helen Branswell that he hoped that in the ensuing months the pace of vaccinations would pick up.
“As we get into January, February, and March, there will be more that they will be able to scale up. By February that should be 30 of Pfizer, 25 Moderna. These are numbers that were given to me," he said, noting that he was the “science person” not the “supply people." That amount of doses could get 27.5 million people vaccinated.
“What I would like to see is that the most vulnerable get vaccinated within the first few months of 2021, and then subsequently beyond that we expeditiously vaccinate others,” he told Branswell.
“The question we always get asked is, 'When is the 25-year-old, 30-year-old person who has no underlying conditions, who’s perfectly healthy, when can that person, wind up getting a vaccine? ... That likely will start somewhere towards the end of April. So that as you get into May, June, and July, you’ll have people in the second quarter vaccinated who want to get vaccinated," said Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Fauci also said he hoped that the recent hopeful vaccine news from Pfizer and Moderna did not encourage people to let their guards down and stop taking precautions to prevent the spread of the virus, which has killed more than 247,000 people in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University.
“Importantly, I want to say this for the people who are listening -- that a vaccine should not be considered as a total substitute at this point for public health measures. In my mind, it should be an incentive for people ... to say, 'You know there is light at the end of the tunnel. Help is coming. Let me hang in there a bit longer with the public health measures," such as wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding gatherings, doing things outdoors if possible, and washing hands frequently, he said.
“If we did just that, we know now that that will have an impact on an outbreak, and if we just hang on enough to do that until we get enough people vaccinated to turn around the dynamics of the outbreak, we will be OK. We will be OK,” he said.
In other remarks, Fauci, who is 79, said he had no thoughts of quitting or retiring. “For me to think about quitting is so completely out of the realm of reality -- there isn’t a chance in the world that I would do that.” He said he still felt on top of his game and “quitting is not in my DNA.”
Asked what he thought about president-elect Joe Biden’s grasp of, and appreciation for, science, Fauci said it was “considerable, in fact, if not profound from a number of standpoints.”
Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla said at the summit that the company had acquired two months of safety data on half of the more than 43,000 trial participants following the second dose of the vaccine. That enables the company to apply for emergency use.
“I’m very happy to report we have already reached it,” Bourla said of the threshold. He declined to say whether the company will file the application this week, saying, “We will announce it as soon as we do.”
Pfizer and Moderna are both expected to seek emergency use authorizations to distribute the vaccines to people most at risk for catching the disease or suffering serious complications, including health care workers, the elderly, and people with underlying health problems.
Bourla also said the company believed it had an obligation to provide the vaccine early to people who had participated in clinical trials but received a placebo. “They raised their hands,” he said, referring to their willingness to volunteer for study.
Bourla said the interim results showing that the vaccine developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech appeared to be more than 90 percent effective marked a “glorious” moment for him and his employees.
“When I heard the over-90 percent efficacy, I felt like I was living a dream,” he said.
Nonetheless, the good news about both messenger RNA vaccines shouldn’t lead people to drop their guards against the coronavirus, he said.
“People need to not relax,” he said. “They should keep religiously the instructions they’re receiving from health authorities,” he added.
A number of experts have said Moderna has a big advantage over Pfizer because its vaccine doesn’t need to be stored at the same super-cold temperatures that the Pfizer one does.
Moderna said its vaccine candidate remains stable at standard refrigerator temperatures of 36 degrees to 46 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 days. And it remains stable for up to six months in a freezer set at minus-4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Pfizer’s vaccine must be kept at minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, which some experts have said could create cold storage problems, particularly for hospitals in rural areas.
But Bourla minimized those concerns, saying Pfizer engineers have designed special isothermal boxes that can hold 1,000 to 5,000 doses and keep the vaccines super-cold. The boxes feature thermometers and global-positioning systems so officials can keep track of them.
STAT News covers health, medicine, life sciences and the pharmaceutical business. It is part of Boston Globe Media Partners, the parent company of The Boston Globe.
Martin Finucane can be reached at martin.finucane@globe.com. Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jonathan.saltzman@globe.com.
"Many" - Google News
November 18, 2020 at 02:27AM
https://ift.tt/2Kjimgj
Dr. Fauci says as many as 20 million Americans could get vaccinations around the end of the year - The Boston Globe
"Many" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QsfYVa
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Dr. Fauci says as many as 20 million Americans could get vaccinations around the end of the year - The Boston Globe"
Post a Comment