The COVID-19 cavalry is on the horizon. Scientists have produced vaccines in record time and there’s an end in sight to the pandemic catastrophe.
Now all you have to do is take the shot.
That should be obvious, but it seems researchers needed a second vaccine to attack the virus of suspicion, paranoia and misinformation that threatens to derail the project.
“To beat this pandemic, we also have to defeat the parallel pandemic of distrust,” said Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Polls show about 60 percent of Americans are willing to take the vaccine. That’s a problem. In order to achieve herd immunity and snuff out the virus, about 70 percent of the population must be vaccinated.
That’s about 230 million Americans, but vaccines aren’t 100 percent effective. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines average about 95 percent efficacy.
That means about 240 million people in the U.S. need to take it. In Florida, herd immunity through a vaccine will require inoculating about 16 million people.
It took an astounding amount of brainpower and organization to produce a vaccine in 10 months.
Pfizer submitted the first application for vaccine authorization on Nov. 20 after trials on 44,000 study patients. The Food and Drug Administration had 150 people working around the clock investigating that data.
An independent committee reviewed those findings. All the documents were made public before Thursday’s hearing. A final go-ahead is expected in a few days.
“This will meet our gold standard of safety and efficacy that the American people have come to trust,” FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn told the Wall Street Journal.
Not all Americans feel that trust. Some Black Americans have a lingering distrust of government based partly on Tuskegee syphilis studies from the 1930s to the 1960s.
“I understand you know historically — everything dating back all the way to the Tuskegee experiments and so forth — why the African American community would have some skepticism,” Barack Obama said last week. “But the fact of the matter is, is that vaccines are why we don’t have polio anymore, the reason why we don’t have a whole bunch of kids dying from measles and smallpox and diseases that used to decimate entire populations and communities.”
Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have said they’ll go on TV and take the vaccine to help promote its acceptance.
COVID-19 has killed more than 250,000 in America, and the numbers are climbing by the hour.
The good news is a light now flickers at the end of the tunnel. Let’s hope the vaccine is strong enough to cure the ignorance surrounding it.
