The first 2.9 million doses of Fischer’s two-dose novel coronavirus vaccine, sent on Sunday from the company’s factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan, are expected to end the epidemic by the end of 2021.
But some states are better set to smell coronavirus than others.
U.S. Department of Disease Control and Prevention The centers are splitting the dose on a weekly basis as they are sent out by PPS and FedEx out of Pfizer’s factory. After that, it was every U.S. It is up to state and region officials to determine exactly where that dose goes – and who is first in line to get it.
It’s a messy process. States, in essence, decide who gets protection first and who should continue to risk catching COVID-19 and possibly die.
“This is an emergency tragedy,” Irwin Redlaner, founding director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told the Daily Beast. “There are now a lot of people at risk and there are many areas that need legal attention with the early availability of vaccines.”
“There will be people and populations that will be left behind,” Radley said.
Perhaps no state explains this confusion better than Florida. The state is highly susceptible to coronavirus due to its aging population – of which about 400,000 live in nursing homes and other support-accommodation facilities – and G.O.P. Governors and legislators who actively resist while eradicating the severity of the epidemic. Social-distance measures by local authorities and efforts to control transmission by mask command.
Florida desperately needs to be vaccinated to catch a growing wave of infections – about 9,000 new cases a day in recent weeks – and to prevent a spike in the darkness of death. About 20,000 people have been lost in the state. As the supply of the vaccine gradually increases, how many more deaths depend on who is allowed to be vaccinated first by state officials.
According to experts surveyed by the Daily Beast, Florida is already going wrong, and the results could be disastrous.
States relax their own vaccine-distribution policies under the broad guidance of the CDC, with four extremely vulnerable groups competing for the first group of vaccines: frontline health workers, elderly nursing home residents, workers in essential industries, and people of color.
Problem: Health officials in Florida, led by government Ron Descentis, are putting them in the wrong order, experts say.
Neither the Florida Department of Health nor Descentis’ office fee responded to requests for comment on the story.
Florida’s strategy, a draft of which is available here, runs 55 percent of Pfizer’s initial supply of 180,000 doses of the genetically engineered “messenger RNA” vaccine – enough to vaccinate 90,000 people, without any waste. .
The state is setting aside the remaining 45 percent of doses for people in nursing homes. It is likely that Florida will also apply the proportion to the remaining about one million doses it receives from Pfizer before the end of the month.
But, as is the case in most states, none of Florida’s initial doses go to essential workers such as grocery-store staff, transportation workers, pharmacy staff, and teachers. What made Florida’s plan so controversial is that, unlike many other large states, Florida authorities have refused to ban businesses and schools or force them to wear masks. Those policies leave Floridia’s essential workers with no option but to be exposed to particularly infectious public and risk.
Similarly, Desentis did not provide detailed details of the vaccine scheme in color communities, which are uniquely susceptible to the virus, due to the structural disadvantages of later generations. Like many other states in Florida, there is a significant overlap between essential workers and color communities, underscoring the importance of vaccinating these groups as quickly as possible.
“The need for a strong equity strategy in Florida is extraordinary,” Lawrence Gostine, a public health expert at Georgetown University, told the Daily Beast.
As it stands, thousands of essential workers in Florida will have to wait, perhaps for months, until Pfizer can produce the vaccine and ship a lot more.
Decentis and his health officials should reverse the order and move the necessary workers closer to the front of the line, experts told the Daily Beast. “Ethical claims require workers to be ahead of the line for vaccinations,” Gostine said.
“Once again we cannot afford to be the last of the poor and underprivileged workers,” said the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, the Rev. Said William Barber II The New York Times.
It makes sense if essential workers in Florida are waiting for their shots The state is making other efforts to save these workers. But it is not. In September, Descentis issued an executive order that would prevent Florida cities from penalizing people for not complying with the local mask order.
This same order made it difficult for cities and counties to close restaurants. “I oppose the order, the term,” said Descentis, a close ally of President Donald Trump. “I don’t think they work.”
Dysentery has often shown a poor understanding of viral epidemics and the basic science of vaccines. They also appeared to support a proposal to give up a second dose of Pfizer’s two-dose vaccine. Data from Pfizer’s large-scale Phase 3 trial made it very clear that without a second dose, the vaccine would not work.
With science-denial in charge, Florida increasingly forces less-than-essential workers to communicate with the unmasked public – and then refuses to help vaccinate those same workers as soon as possible.
Of course, experts agree that the necessary workers to move forward Being in line for the vaccine means tying up other vulnerable people later. It is not that hospital staff and residents of nursing homes do not deserve protection. They do. And it’s not that vaccinating this population too early won’t save lives. It will.
But these groups have ways to protect themselves that many essential workers do not.
“Healthcare workers at most facilities will be fully equipped in the most advanced PPE available,” Redlaner explained, using abbreviations for personal protective devices such as gloves, goggles, masks and facial ield. “It’s not true of a grocery store or a pharmacy or a bus driver’s clerk.”
Likewise, because nursing homes have a very controlled environment, staff are required to provide additional PPE. Can wear, and limit visits to keep residents safe and reduce the urgency to vaccinate them. “Nursing homes are scrutinizing residents and staff very well,” Jessefrey Klausner, a professor of medicine and public health at UCLA who previously worked at CDC, told the Daily Beast.
And keeping in mind that nursing home staff is the main vector for spreading to facilities, vaccination staff protect residents – freeing up potential doses that residents have to go to the workers they need.
“If employees are vaccinated and protective masks, PPE, etc. can be ensured, then these settings should be able to control infection and death and use an early supply of vaccines to vaccinate other front line and minority groups. , “Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist with the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, told the Daily Beast.
Nearly 22 million people in Florida could receive overall protection from more and more appropriate, early groups in the vaccine state if officials shift a portion of the early dose to the required workers. But even that strategy will not prevent the trouble, as all experts say – or reverse the damage Decentes has already done to his state.
Michael said incoming vaccines are too late and too short in terms of supply to prevent a third wave from coming to many U.S. counties, even if the planned phased rollout begins in January 2021. “Our simulations show that the only way to control incoming waves is to increase social distance measures, with a moderate increase in people following these steps capable of suppressing and even flattening these waves in many areas.”
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