ANALYSIS: Why a vaccine will not stop the Covid-19 pandemic right away

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Tue, 2020-09-15 09:31 — mike kraft

Here's why a vaccine will not stop the Covid-19 pandemic right away Experts say even if a coronavirus vaccine was approved in January or even earlier, it will be many months before it has an effect on the pandemic. Maggie Fox, CNN CNN

... while vaccine manufacturers, public health experts and the federal government are all confident one or more of the coronavirus vaccines being tested now will be shown to work safely by the end of the year, the US and the world will still be a long way from ending the pandemic.

I feel cautiously optimistic that we will have a vaccine by the end of this calendar year, as we get into early 2021," Dr. Anthony Fauci, who, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is helping lead the medical battle against the virus, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Friday.

"But it's not going to be turning a switch off and turning the switch on. It's going to be gradual," Fauci added.

"Having" a vaccine does not mean having a vaccine approved, distributed and into the arms of more than 300 million Americans.

First, any vaccine must either be approved or authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration. That's a process that under normal circumstances can take months or years. While the FDA has promised a speedier process for a Covid-19 vaccine, it must still go through a committee known as the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, or VRBAC.

The FDA will almost certainly allow a shortcut process known as emergency use authorization, or EUA, but the agency has said it will require an "EUA-plus" that adds at least some layers of scrutiny.

"It's unlikely that a Covid-19 vaccine will receive full approval and broad distribution right away. Instead, the FDA will probably authorize vaccines for use in targeted groups of people at high risk from Covid and most likely to benefit from the vaccine,"

Dr. Mark McClellan and Dr. Scott Gottlieb, both former FDA commissioners, wrote in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal Monday. "All this means that at least initially, Covid vaccines won't provide the sort of herd immunity that can help extinguish an epidemic."

That will take time -- likely well into next year, even if a vaccine were to be authorized in January, most experts who spoke to CNN predicted. ...

Although manufacturers are already making vaccine doses, it takes time. And the US will likely need more than 600 million doses of vaccine -- enough for everyone to get two doses of the vaccine. ...

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