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WASHINGTON: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked state public health officials to prepare to distribute a potential coronavirus vaccine to high-risk groups in late October, according to They showed documents released by the agency on Wednesday (September 2). .
The timing of a vaccine has taken on political significance as US President Donald Trump seeks re-election in November after committing billions of federal dollars to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19, which has killed to more than 180,000 Americans.
“For the purpose of initial planning, the CDC provided states with certain planning assumptions as they work on specific state plans for vaccine distribution, including the possibility of having limited quantities of vaccines in October and November,” one told Reuters. CDC spokesperson.
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The New York Times had previously reported that the CDC had contacted officials in all 50 states and five major cities with the planning information.
The nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, said Wednesday on MSNBC that based on the rate of patient enrollment in ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials, there might be enough clinical data to know in November or December that one of the vaccines is safe and effective. .
Documents published online by the New York Times showed that the CDC is preparing to make one or two COVID-19 vaccines available in limited quantities as soon as the end of October.
The vaccines will be available at no cost first to high-risk groups, including healthcare workers, national security personnel and nursing home residents and staff, the agency said in the documents.
Regulators around the world have repeatedly said that the speed of development will not compromise the safety of vaccines, as the fastest results would come from running parallel trials that are usually done in sequence. But those guarantees have not convinced everyone.
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Preliminary results from a survey conducted over the past three months in 19 countries showed that only about 70 percent of British and American respondents would take a COVID-19 vaccine if it were available, Scott Ratzan, co-leader of a group called Business Partners to Convince, he told Reuters in August.
Drug developers, including Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer, are leading the race to develop a safe and effective vaccine for respiratory disease.
The CDC documents describe two vaccine candidates that should be stored at temperatures of -70 degrees Celsius and -20 degrees Celsius. Those storage requirements match the candidate profiles of Pfizer and Moderna.
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Last month, the US Department of Health said the CDC was executing an existing contract option with McKesson Corp to support possible vaccine distribution.
CDC Director Robert Redfield has asked state governors to expedite McKesson’s requests to build vaccine distribution centers and to consider waiving requirements that would prevent them from being fully operational by Nov. 1, according to a letter. recent obtained by Reuters.
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