[ad_1]
Operation Warp Speed chief scientific advisor Moncef Slaoui told CNBC Americans can expect to return to “ normal ” by summer 2021, as families across the United States is spending Thanksgiving apart this year to protect loved ones.
“We hope that we would have vaccinated 70% to 80% of the American population by May or June 2021, so I hope that by the summer we will be significantly back to normal,” Slaoui said in a statement. interview Wednesday night on “The News with Shepard Smith”.
The coronavirus pandemic is tearing cities and towns across the United States apart and data shows it shows no signs of slowing down. According to the Covid Tracking Project, 88,000 people were hospitalized for Covid-19 on Tuesday. Deaths are also on the rise. The United States reported more than 2,100 deaths on Tuesday, the highest number of deaths since May, according to CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data.
Doctors and scientists, however, reassure Americans that there will be a reprieve. Two weeks after Thanksgiving, the FDA will meet to discuss whether to give the green light to Pfizer’s vaccine. If so, the government plans to ship 6.4 million doses to communities across the country.
Slaoui said vaccinating all Americans would be a “challenge” but he thinks it is achievable. “People need to know that each year between 140 and 180 million doses of influenza vaccine are produced, distributed and inoculated to the American population in a period from August through, perhaps, Jan, “” Slaoui told me. “So we can double that number over time, but it’s not from scratch, which was very different from the tests.”
Host Shepard Smith noted that another challenge will be convincing people that a vaccine is safe to take. A recent Gallup poll showed that only 58% of Americans said they would take a coronavirus vaccine.
“It is a great concern and it is really very unfortunate that the political context in which the development of this vaccine has taken place has exacerbated the reluctance and the lack of confidence that stem from the fact that we have gone very quickly”, Slaoui said.
Slaoui explained that the scientists did not “start with a blank piece of paper” and were able to skip 10 to 15 years of discovery and development work that has taken place around the platform technologies in which vaccines are made. He said that although it normally takes 6 to 7 years to discover a vaccine, much of the groundwork has already been done due to recent years of research. Another factor that helped speed up the process was the large number of participants in the clinical trials of the Covid vaccine, Slaoui said.
“We will know more about these vaccines, their effectiveness and their safety than the ‘average’ short-term vaccines,” Slaoui said. “What we won’t know much about is their long-term safety, just because the trials needed to be done quickly, and it’s important to vaccinate people. We have 2,000 people dying every day.”
Slaoui said a comprehensive surveillance system was in place to track people once people started taking the vaccines. Slaoui added that if there was any sign of long-term problems, those problems will be addressed “immediately”.
“Please keep your ears open and your mind open, listen, and then judge on the facts and the data,” Slaoui. said. “I am convinced that if we do this, most Americans will agree to be vaccinated. 95% effectiveness is insurance against this pandemic.”
[ad_2]
Source link