Most Americans better buckle up for another year of the current pandemic. Researchers recently said that most people won’t receive a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine until the spring or summer of 2021.
Specialists and scientists told Bloomberg that health care workers and high risk patients will be the first recipients of the coronavirus vaccine. Business workers, children and families might have to wait even longer to receive the vaccine
Dr. Anthony Fauci — who works with the White House Coronavirus Task Force — told Bloomberg that it might not be until 2021 for vaccines to hit the general public.
“I would hope that by the time we get well into the second half of 2021 that the companies will have delivered the hundreds of millions of doses they have promised,” said Fauci.
Why? Health regulators won’t have a high amount of efficacy data for people so it’s unlikely they’ll want to spread it too far. The current products require two doses, too, which could limit how many early supplies there are in the early days. And there’s no government plan on how to distribute the vaccines.
“For three, to six, to nine months, there will be more people wanting a vaccine than there are vaccines,” Stephane Bancel, chief executive officer of Moderna Inc., told Bloomberg.
Currently, vaccines remain in the trail phase so it’s unclear when or if any vaccine will be ready. We have to wait for the results of those clinical trials before anything is confirmed. The race to find a vaccine remains underway and experts still expect one to drop in early 2021, as I wrote for Deseret.com.
That said, drugmakers have begun planning for production of the vaccine to begin at the end of summer. Mass production will look to provide a vaccine for more than 300 million people, as I wrote for Deseret.com.
“Exactly when the vaccine materials will be in production and manufacturing? It’s probably four to six weeks away,” an unnamed official told CNBC. “But we will be actively manufacturing by the end of the summer.”