At a White House “vaccine summit” Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence said he expects the first COVID-19 vaccine to be approved for distribution within days.
But he urged residents to continue practicing mitigation methods like frequent hand washing, wearing masks, avoiding crowds and maintaining distance from people who are not part of their households.
“We all still have work to do,” Pence said, referencing his experience running a marathon and finding that the last few miles are the hardest. “The finish line is around the corner.”
Approval for a vaccine produced by Pfizer could come later this week, with a second vaccine from Moderna slated for consideration next week.
Gov. John Bel Edwards, the only Democrat on the panel, and his counterparts from Tennessee, Florida and Texas attended the summit and shared how their states have been preparing for the massive challenge that will begin as soon as Friday: distributing COVID-19 vaccines to their residents quickly, safely and equitably.
Edwards said he and other state officials have been working since last spring to prepare, running simulations with Louisiana State University’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Training that helped identify gaps in their plans.
“It’s not anything new. It’s just at a scale that we don’t typically have to do it at,” Edwards said.
Officials expect Louisiana to receive about 40,000 doses during the first week of COVID-19 vaccine distribution, followed by another 40,000 the following week.
Hospital workers and long-term care residents and workers are the first priorities. Pfizer’s vaccine, which requires ultra-cold storage, will be distributed to hospitals that have cold storage capacity. Moderna’s vaccine, expected to be available shortly after Pfizer’s, will go to nursing homes, Edwards said last week.
While the two vaccines will be cleared for adult use in the U.S., testing is only now getting started with children — and only with adolescents.
“Right now, it appears unlikely that a vaccine will be ready for children before the start of the next school year in August,” Wesley Kufel, Binghamton University, State University of New York, said in an article published separately from the summit.
Kufel added that Pfizer, working with Germany’s BioNTech, expanded its COVID-19 vaccine testing to children ages 12 and older only in October. The other leading vaccine maker, Moderna, announced on Dec. 2 that it planned to begin COVID-19 vaccine trials in children ages 12-17 soon.
— By David Jacobs/The Center Square. Additional reporting by Laura Olson/Louisiana Illuminator
— Kufel’s comments are from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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