Hmmmm?
Didn’t one Donald Trump say a vaccine would be available as a ‘October Surprise’?
How. about November 1st?
2 days before Election Day and before the vaccine trial for several of the companies are NOT over?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has notified public health officials in all 50 states and five large cities to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to health care workers and other high-risk groups as soon as late October or early November.
The new C.D.C. guidance is the latest sign of an accelerating race for a vaccine against a disease that has killed more than 184,000 Americans. The documents were sent out last week, the same day that President Trump said in his speech to the Republican National Convention that a vaccine might arrive before the end of the year.
Over the past week, both Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Stephen Hahn, who heads the Food and Drug Administration, have said in interviews with news organizations that a vaccine could be available for certain groups before clinical trials have been completed, if the data were overwhelmingly positive.
Public health experts agree that agencies at all levels of government should urgently prepare for what will eventually be a vast, complex effort to vaccinate hundreds of millions of Americans. But the possibility of a rollout in late October or early November has also heightened concerns that the Trump administration is seeking to rush the distribution of a vaccine — or simply to suggest that one is possible — before Election Day on Nov. 3.
“This timeline of the initial deployment at the end of October is deeply worrisome for the politicization of public health and the potential safety ramifications,” said Saskia Popescu, an infection prevention epidemiologist in Arizona. “It’s hard not to see this as a push for a pre-election vaccine.”
Three documents were sent to public health officials in all states and territories as well as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and San Antonio on Aug. 27. They outlined detailed scenarios for distributing two unnamed vaccine candidates — each requiring two doses a few weeks apart — at hospitals, mobile clinics and other facilities offering easy access to the first targeted recipients.
The guidance noted that health care professionals, including long-term-care employees, would be among the first to receive the product, along with other essential workers and national security employees.
People aged 65 or older, as well as those from “racial and ethnic minority populations,” Native Americans and incarcerated individuals — all communities known to be at greater risk of contracting the virus and experiencing severe disease — were also prioritized in the documents….
A piece on questions asked at a Long Island New York Newsday forum….
…with public health officials expediting the race for a vaccine — and reports that two major labs could have a vaccine ready for at-risk populations and health care workers by early November — the safety and efficacy of vaccinations was the number one question posed by anxious Long Islanders who submitted questions.
Dr. Uzma Syed, an infectious disease specialist at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip, said 13 vaccines are in clinical trials in the U.S. and more than 100 globally. While the process is moving faster than normal, the only way to ensure that a vaccine is safe is to allow it to go through its trials.
“We don’t want to go into anything prematurely before having the data,” said Syed. “We really have to let science lead and follow the methods that have always worked.”
But the doctors cautioned that even if with clinical trials, unexpected side effects may only manifest once the vaccine is on the market and has been widely distributed. And the long-term effects of a vaccine may not be known for some time….
…many Americans appear reluctant to be vaccinated, even if a vaccine were FDA-approved and available to them at no cost. Asked if they would get such a COVID-19 vaccine, 65% say they would, but 35% would not.
The results are based on July 20-Aug. 2 polling in Gallup’s COVID-19 tracking survey, conducted with members of Gallup’s probability-based panel.
While Gallup has consistently seen that U.S. party preferences play a strong role in Americans’ views on COVID-19, the new poll extends that to willingness to be vaccinated. Eighty-one percent of Democrats are willing to be vaccinated today if a free and FDA-approved vaccine were available. That compares with 59% of independents and just under half of Republicans, 47%….
*Update….
Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser for the White House vaccine program, said on Thursday that it was “extremely unlikely but not impossible” that a vaccine could be available by the end of October.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Dr. Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser of the Trump administration’s coronavirus vaccine and treatment initiative, called Operation Warp Speed, explained that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance to states to prepare for a vaccine as early as late October — a notification Dr. Slaoui said he had learned of through the news media — was “the right thing to do” in case a vaccine was ready by that time. “It would be irresponsible not to be ready if that was the case,” he said.
However, he described that as a “very, very low chance.”…