The first doses of Covid-19 vaccine are now rolling out to various hospitals and day care centers around America.
“Bless You, Scientists, for doing what you do!”
However, as the old saying goes, availability of the vaccine is but “the light at the end of the tunnel”. The problem: a very long tunnel lies ahead of us.
Logistics are going to be super complicated. There are hundreds of millions of Americans who will need the vaccine, and each patient will require two doses, a primary and a booster, injected perhaps several weeks or a month apart. These citizens live in cities, small towns, Indian reservations, and remote boondocks. Some of the latter areas have no hospitals or even a local doctor.
Delivery of this miracle medicine to everyone who wants it will be daunting, similar to the difficulty we’ve had in the past year getting people tested for coronavirus. Appointments, queues, possible lack of supplies (like syringes, swabs), and accurate record-keeping for booster shots. Some of these vaccines need to be refrigerated at -70 degrees, and many small communities lack facilities for this.
There are two vaccines available right now: Pfizer and Moderna. The Pfizer model requires the extreme refrigeration. The Moderna vaccine can be kept in regular refrigeration; however, it is the first drug ever produced by this company and Moderna’s ability to get a product produced in mass quantity and distributed to market is untested. In this case, the company would be expected to supply hundreds of millions of doses to the medical community.
Recall Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” So, we can expect supply hiccups.
We’ve already seen evidence of this. A few days ago Army General Gustave Perna, head honcho of Operation Warp Speed, apologized to the medical community for drastically-reduced deliveries of the vaccine. “A miscommunication”, he said.
(Some hopefully coincidental news hit the Internet this week that some folks were offering huge amounts of money to jump the line and get their vaccine early. Now, when large amounts of vaccine mysteriously disappear from the Federally-controlled Operation Warp Speed supply line, one has to wonder where those crates of vaccine ended up. Doctors, Congressmen, journalists…no one can find out. Horrible, horrible, horrible thought…the Trump Administration has found yet another way to monetize the Presidency! Gosh, I hope that isn’t so. And yet, it wouldn’t surprise me, as a lot of sickening things have happened in the past four years.)
There will be pushback from some Americans as to the need to get the vaccine, particularly from hardcore Trump supporters who refused to wear facemasks (i.e. the pandemic is “overblown”, “I’m young, so it won’t affect me!”, “let the virus run wild and we’ll develop herd immunity”, “Covid is a Democratic hoax”) and anti-vaxxers, those folks who think vaccines cause autism and other illnesses. And a lot of people who aren’t anti-vaxxers are wary of a vaccine that was developed in one year (“Warp Speed”) when it normally takes several years to come up with a safe vaccine.
Hence, there will be a lot of disinformation flooding the Nation while public health professionals are simultaneously attempting to achieve nationwide herd immunity with the vaccine. The task will be daunting.
A good example was supplied to me this morning, when my granddaughter Jessica, who is a Registered Nurse, informed me that she received her Pfizer vaccine injection yesterday. She was elated to get it. However, she told me that a lot of the medical professionals in her hospital are not going to take it right now; they’re going to wait to see if there are side effects among their peers (the guinea pigs like Jessica).
How about this for political leadership: G.O.P Congressman Ken Buck of Colorado announced this week that he will not take the vaccine because he’s “an American”. The Republican explained: “I have the freedom to decide if I’m going to take a vaccine or not and in this case I am not going to take the vaccine. I’m more concerned about the safety of the vaccine than I am the side effects of the disease.”
Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have said it better.
At this rate, our Nation might not eradicate this plague for many years.
There will surely be some allergic and other reactions to the vaccine by a small number of people (there always are with vaccines) which will be blown totally out of proportion by the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy nutjobs. You can count on that.
There will also be urban myths that develop. For example, among the early recipients of the vaccine was a very old patient in a nursing home who received his Covid-19 vaccine injection earlier this week. A few days later he died of a heart attack. Of course, old people die of heart attacks every day in nursing homes, because they’re old and sick with hearts that are pretty worn out. However, the vaxxers and paranoid folks are already pointing to this case as proof that the vaccine isn’t safe.
The inoculation campaign will take many months. It has been estimated that this project will take at least six months; it will be the largest peacetime emergency undertaking of all time in the United States.
There are 30 million Americans aged 65 and above (the “high risk” age cohort) who will need 60 millions doses alone. There are also tens of millions of medically high-risk people, many of whom are much younger, with pre-existing conditions that make them particularly susceptible to serious Covid-19 complications. They will need to be identified and be allowed priority in the National queue.
There will, of course, be shameless rich folks who will “jump the line” with bribes of officials, doctors, etc. And there will be scumbag con men who will offer fake vaccinations, the opportunity to “jump the line”, and fake vaccination certificates. The opportunity for juicy scandals is great.
There has already been a mini-tempest about “line jumping” and, of course, it involved the lame duck Trump Administration. Evidently, someone at the White House arranged for all the bigshots and staffers to get their vaccine inoculations this week, despite the fact that the whole Trump crew has been dismissive about the pandemic, hasn’t worn facemasks, has flaunted public health guidelines about social gatherings, and are mostly not in the high-risk category.
What do you expect when immoral/corrupt Trump folks are involved?
News of this travesty-in-the-works reached the news media and the embarrassed Administration scotched the plan.
In the meanwhile, the virus will continue to do its dirty work. The current daily death toll in the United States is between 2,000 and 3,000 per day: this will likely continue through the Winter months. It’s hard to fathom but the equivalent of the carnage of the 9/11 catastrophe is being experienced now in America every 1.5 days!
The President’s Coronavirus Task Force, which used to do daily briefings on the pandemic, stopped doing so months ago. The President hasn’t said a word about the unfolding humanitarian disaster since September, when he Tweeted that his Administration had the situation “under control”. Another couple hundred thousand Americans have died since then.
“Not a problem” is probably the President’s attitude, since he isn’t among the 300,000 deceased.
The fact that there now exists a cure, although it is many months off for most people, will probably cause many folks to let their guard down and backslide on recommended public health measures.
Already we have seen a tremendous uptick in infections and hospitalizations from Thanksgiving family get-togethers, just like epidemiologists had predicted. And, we still have Christmas and New Year’s celebrations upcoming.
There will be “much mistletoing”, lots of hugging and squeezing, crowded dinner tables, football game cheering in man caves, and the kind of coughing in crowded living rooms that one would expect at this time of the year.
And then, the guests will disperse from the superspreader event and pass along their viral Christmas gifts to unexpecting strangers, coworkers, and relatives.
A perfect storm.
As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, stated this week, we are in for some very dark times in the next couple of months.
And yet, unmasked adults continue to endanger themselves and others because…it is their right to be stupid. I ran into four of them inside a WalMart a few days ago; they had to walk past an employee at the entrance who was handing out complimentary facemasks.
As Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee said yesterday, “One thing this vaccine will not solve, or cure, is selfishness or indifference to what is happening to our neighbors around us”.
Amen, Brother.
Charlie and I are going to wear facemasks, be prudent with our social interactions, and attempt to stay alive until we’re invited to get the vaccine.
And then we will be first in the line at the doctor’s office with our shirt sleeves rolled up.
