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Washington, United States: The Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines could be approved in a matter of weeks, but who will get them first in the United States?
A high-level panel of American experts voted Tuesday that healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities should take priority in the first phase.
“I believe that my vote reflects the maximum benefits, the minimum harm, promoting justice and mitigating the inequalities in health that exist, with respect to the distribution of this vaccine,” said José Romero, president of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yet as the sequence continues, US experts may differ from other countries in prioritizing the “critical workers” who keep society going, potentially even before those most at risk.
To be clear, there will not be a single set of rules for the entire nation.
At the risk of confusion, as was the case during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign, the federal government only makes recommendations to the states, which decide for themselves how to distribute the doses and who has priority.
Panels of top experts have already issued their opinions, which diverge on certain key points and reveal the tension at the center of the debate: vaccines must protect the most vulnerable and help facilitate a return to normalcy.
It’s about reviving the economy as quickly as possible that the United States can differentiate itself.
France’s highest health authority recommended starting with the residents and employees of retirement homes who work there, followed by the elderly and health workers, then those over 50, the people whose jobs put them at risk, people at high medical risk, the poor and finally the rest of the population.
That is the approach recommended by the World Health Organization and adopted by several wealthy countries, Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, told AFP.
In the US, the panel overwhelmingly voted to prioritize healthcare workers and long-term care facilities, which have so far accounted for about 40 percent of deaths in the country.
Read: Healthcare Workers and Nursing Home Residents Must Get Vaccinated First – US Panel
The committee did not vote on what would happen after the initial phase, but experts proposed prioritizing essential workers in phase “1b”, followed by adults with multiple risk factors and adults over 65 in phase. “1 C”.
– Keep the country running –
Essential workers include teachers, workers from slaughterhouses to supermarkets who feed Americans, and those who drive buses and trains, sell them their medicine, maintain order, or deliver mail and packages.
The people in these jobs are often Hispanic or minority black, and they have been disproportionately hit by the pandemic.
In practice, these ethical, epidemiological, and economic considerations can be ignored in the initial rush of doses.
There are still problems to be solved: while it can be easy to focus on nursing homes and hospitals, how are pharmacists and doctors supposed to confirm that a person is really an essential worker or has two underlying conditions?
The Trump administration has said that retirement homes will receive vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech in mid-December in the event of a regulatory green light.
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