Staff Editor, Opinion

It’s been a little over a month since we last talked about the coronavirus vaccines in this newsletter, and the rollout is now decisively less of a disaster: The number of vaccinations has increased sixfold since the beginning of January, with about one in 10 Americans having received at least the first dose.

But that still leaves the other nine in 10. Here’s a look at what obstacles are still hampering the rollout, what new ones have emerged and how public health experts say they can be overcome.
Warped speed

In the first week of January, providers were vaccinating fewer than 400,000 Americans per day: At that rate, it would have taken more than two years to immunize the whole country. But as of today, the rate has spiked to about 1.6 million vaccinations per day, just surpassing the 1.5 million target the Biden administration had hoped to hit.

If the country maintains its current pace, about one in two Americans will be at least partly vaccinated around late June, and nearly every American by early November.

Slow as that seems, only a handful of countries are moving faster. In the words of Matt Yglesias, “It is worth keeping in mind that America’s vaccine rollout [expletive]show is genuinely one of the very best anywhere in the world.”
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT

Still, some public health experts are warning that the United States needs to be vaccinating three million people a day to get ahead of the virus. At that rate, roughly 80 percent of the country would be immunized by July.

“The ‘man on the moon’ is the kind of goal that we should be aiming for at this point,” Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, told The Washington Post. “Having this one million a day, or even 1.5 million vaccines a day, is just not aspirational.”
The new variants

Case rates have fortunately been on a steep decline since the holidays, but new, more infectious variants have emerged in recent weeks and one is expected to predominate in the United States by next month. So far, none of these variants have been confirmed to be more deadly, but some seem to spread much more rapidly, which public-health experts say poses a grave threat.

Preliminary evidence suggests that one variant in particular, first identified in South Africa, can blunt the effectiveness of the available vaccines to varying degrees. But scientists are hopeful that they will still protect against severe illness, much as the flu vaccine does.
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT

As a precaution, Moderna has already begun developing a booster shot aimed at the South Africa variant, and researchers are in the early stages of developing a vaccine that could protect against not only every variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, but also other coronaviruses that could cause future pandemics.

For now, though, many experts warn the United States is in a precarious position. “The more the virus is allowed to pass from one person to the next, the more it is able to mutate,” The Times editorial board writes. “And the more it mutates, the greater the chances that it will evolve into something that is even more transmissible, or even less susceptible to existing vaccines, or even deadlier than the virus already is.”

Vaccinating people faster would obviously help, my colleague Ezra Klein argues, and so too would deploying rapid, at-home testing. “What we need to do right now is to plan for the worst-case scenario,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told him. “And when I say ‘worst case,’ I’m potentially talking about the most likely case. Let’s not wait until we wrap the car around the tree to start pumping the brakes.”

What might that mean for everyday people? “The good news is that we know what to do,” says Apoorva Mandavilli, a Times science reporter. “Wear a mask or maybe two, stay as far from others as you can, meet people only outside or at least open the windows, and wash your hands often.”
The New York Times
Me: One shot is not enough, you need 2 shots to be relatively safe and that might occur between 2-4 weeks after the 2nd shot, but not before!!