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A gigantic logistics operation was underway in the United States this Saturday to begin distributing 2.9 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine: hours earlier, on Friday night, the agency that regulates the pharmaceutical sector gave authorization for its use. Emergency response to the vaccine developed by the American pharmaceutical company with its German partner BioNTech, the first to prevent covid-19 approved in the most affected country worldwide.
In a message to Americans, Donald Trump spoke of a “miracle of science” and promised that “the first vaccine will be administered in less than 24 hours.” The second part is not true: the first doses are expected to arrive on Monday morning, with the first people being vaccinated on that day.
The authorization, when the country approaches 300 thousand deaths, came just 336 days later Chinese authorities have shared the genome sequence of a new coronavirus. And the same day that the US recorded 3309 deaths, another record and 231,771 new confirmed cases, according to data from John Hopkins University.
The US president, who spent months devaluing the severity of the pandemic, had started the day to put pressure on the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). “Get the fucking shots now, Dr. Hahn,” he wrote on Twitter. Hahn is Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the FDA.
According to the newspaper The New York TimesAt around the same time, Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, threatened Hahn with firing if approval did not come before Saturday. Before the election in which he was defeated by Joe Biden on November 3, Trump accused the agency of “delaying” the vaccine to harm him.
Hahn described the approval as “a significant milestone” in the fight against the pandemic, explaining that it comes after “An open and transparent review process”. Authorization for emergency use is not the same as full approval, but the practical consequences are identical; the difference is that a faster path was followed, only possible in specific cases, such as a pandemic. It is the same type of authorization that the Pfizer vaccine received in the United Kingdom, where it began to be administered on Tuesday.
This approval “is expected to bring the promise of changing the course of this pandemic in the United States,” said Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biological Research and Evaluation. “I think we should stop for a moment and think that we are experiencing a disaster every day, with massive casualties in the United States. But now we have this vaccine, developed in record time, that can really save us and the world from this terrible pandemic, ”said emergency doctor Leana Wen. “This is a really monumental moment for us.”
Mid 2021
But even if the operation to distribute and administer the vaccine, one of the most logistically complex health logistics campaigns, goes exactly as planned, experts anticipate that it will not be possible to vaccinate low-risk adults before mid-2021, maybe even at the end of the year.
According to General Gustave Perna, chief operating officer, the first 2.9 million doses were to begin leaving Pfizer’s facilities in Michigan, Wisconsin, in monitored planes and trucks on Saturday. It is from there that all the doses will leave en route to the places destined for each of the 50 states, most of them hospitals. Once they arrive, they will be administered as soon as possible to health professionals and residents of the home, having to be kept at a temperature between -60 and 80 degrees Celsius.
Until Monday, the vaccines will reach 150 places, between Tuesday and Wednesday another 450.
Plans outlined in recent months foresee potential obstacles such as protests or bad weather. In principle, the transport will be provided by the FedEx parcel company and the UPS express courier service; Each shipment will be followed by a dry ice shipment the next day. But if necessary, military planes and helicopters can be used to deliver the vaccine to remote locations.
Three “really tough” months
Almost ready to use, there are another 2.9 million booster doses needed after three weeks for the vaccine to be 95% effective, as well as 500,000 to react to an unexpected emergency.
Despite all this effort, deaths from covid-19 will continue to rise. Experts had already warned that this would happen after the Thanksgiving holiday on November 26, when more than a million Americans flew into the country. “In two or three weeks we will be able to see an explosion of cases,” warned immunologist Anthony Fauci, who is primarily responsible for the response to the health crisis. In some areas of the US, it is an outbreak in addition to the outbreak that was already being witnessed.
The next three months will be “really tough,” CDC Director of Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield was quoted as saying by CNN on Thursday. “During the next 60 to 90 days we will have more deaths per day than on September 11,” he said, referring to the terrorist attacks that killed 2,977 people in the US in 2001. “And the reality is that authorization to a vaccine won’t impact that. “
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