On November 9, 2020, Pfizer announced that its vaccine to fight CoVid-19 was found to be 90% effective. At the time, the US was projected to near 300,000 deaths by the end of 2020, and the vaccine seemed to be the answer to end the pandemic. On December 11, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, approved Pfizer’s vaccine for emergency use. Subsequently, a week later on December 18, 2020, the FDA approved Moderna’s vaccine candidate. With both of these vaccines, two doses would need to be administered for the vaccine to be considered effective. Many jumped with joy at the news of successful, federally approved vaccines, but few knew the challenges that would come with distributing a vaccine to an entire nation.
The Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed produced the Moderna vaccine and in combination with the Pfizer vaccine, they planned to have 20 million doses distributed to Americans by the end of December 2020. On December 30, 2020, the Trump Administration, however, fell short of their goal by having only administered 2.1 million shots to Americans. On December 30, 2020, Former President Trump blamed the vaccine distribution failure on the states and said that it was the states’ responsibility to administer the vaccine.
To try to rescue the United States from this crumbling pandemic that now claims over 400,000 deaths since the start of the Co-Vid 19 pandemic, President Biden announced that his administration plans to administer 100 million CoVid-19 vaccine doses in his first 100 days. One substantial challenge that the Biden Administration has had to overcome is that there was “no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration.”
With a new president and administration, there is hope on the horizon. On January 26, 2021, President Biden announced that “it plans to buy an additional 100 million doses each from both Moderna and Pfizer,” which increases the total vaccines in the U.S. by 50%. The vaccines are “expected to deliver this summer.” On this same day, President Biden stated an even more ambitious goal and that he would like to see 150 million CoVid-19 vaccines administered to Americans in his first 100 days in office.
What is challenging, however, is that even with administering 1 million doses a day, it would take over a year to get the total US population of over 328,000,000 to achieve herd immunity. Experts believe that for the United States to achieve herd immunity and have a resistance to the spread of CoVid-19, 70-80% of the country would need to be vaccinated. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease and vaccine expert at Baylor College of Medicine, stated that America should make it a goal to have 2-3 million CoVid-19 vaccines administered to slow the rate of the pandemic.
There is a vaccine timeline that places healthcare workers, elderly people, high-risk populations, and essential workers as a priority for receiving the vaccine. To see where you stand in the “line” for the vaccine, click here for the New York Times Vaccine Tool. A new president and administration gives us hope, but one thing is clear: our “return to normal” is still months away, and we must be patient.