Most U.S. adults should get access to a COVID-19 vaccine by May

Britain will start vaccinating its elderly and health care workers next week against COVID-19, and the U.S. is expected to approve two vaccines for emergency use in the next few weeks, but it's going to be a "slow walk to normalcy," Renuka Rayasam writes at Politico. With vaccines in hand, "the first phase of the global pandemic will be over by New Year's Eve," but "2021 should be a year of small victories, each one inching us back toward pre-pandemic life." After speaking with vaccine experts Mark Slifka and Peter Hotez, Rayasam came up with a sketch of how 2021 may play out.

The first two vaccines expected to get FDA approval, from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, both require two doses administered three to four weeks apart. The federal government will likely recommend that front-line health care workers and long-term care residents be given first access to the vaccine, but the first group won't be fully vaccinated until January.

There will be milestones throughout 2021, and "if everything goes as planned — the vaccines are safe, they provide lasting immunity, there are enough doses, and they get distributed properly — the second phase of the global pandemic will end a year from now," Politico reports. But most adults will likely have access to the vaccine by the end of May, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert. By that point, more vaccines will likely be approved, as will new treatments to reduce COVID-19 deaths, and we'll have more safety data.

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The tipping-point month may end up being October, however, when "Goldman Sachs analysts are predicting that vaccinations will be available to kids," Rayasam writes. "Right now drug companies have not yet tested COVID vaccines on children under the age of 12 (or pregnant women), saying they want to wait until there's more safety data available for adults." But by October, she adds, "schools will close because of snow storms and not COVID outbreaks and kids can go trick-or-treating." Read more at Politico.