In a series of morning show appearances on Tuesday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar predicted that COVID-19 vaccines will be available for the general public by the spring. "We have anticipated that we will have enough vaccine by the end of December to have vaccinated our most vulnerable citizens in nursing homes and otherwise," Azar said on Today. "And by the end of January, enough for all health-care workers and first responders, and enough for all Americans by the end of March to early April."
The Trump administration has historically painted an optimistic picture with its estimates of when a vaccine will be available, with President Trump having even suggested at one point that a vaccine would be available by Election Day. Experts have additionally warned that there are looming hurdles involved in the distribution of the eventual vaccine, from defining who qualifies as "high risk" or "essential workers," to the practicality of widely disseminating the product, given what Stat News describes as the "taxing storage requirements" of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine in particular.
On Monday, though, there did come good news: The vaccine in development from Pfizer and BioNTech was found to be more than 90 percent effective against COVID-19 in a first interim analysis. And Azar's timeline additionally fits in with predictions from Stat about vaccines beginning to become available to Americans by the spring.
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While drug makers by comparison are prepared to disseminate 194 to 198 million doses of flu vaccine in the 2020-2021 season, experts say roughly 330 million Americans will need immunity to COVID-19 before herd immunity sets in. On Monday, Pfizer said it is prepared to deliver 50 million doses of its vaccine by the end of 2020, and ramp up production to 1.3 billion in 2021.
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