How did we get COVID vaccines so fast? Unlike everything else in 2020, pretty much everything went right from start to finish https://vitals.lifehacker.com/how-they-made-a-vaccine-so-fast-1845880519
"Who Wants To Be A Guinea Pig?": Health Workers Balk At Vaccine; 40% Of Staff At One Chicago Hospital Refuse To Take At one Chicago hospital where the city's first COVID-19 vaccine was administered on Tuesday, 40% of the staff said in a survey earlier this month that they would not take it. Sherrie Burch, 56, a ward clerk at Loretto, is baffled by how quickly the Covid-19 vaccine was developed, given how long medical developments typically take. And that makes her nervous. “It just happened too fast for me,” Burch said, adding that her children, grandchildren and 76-year-old mother aren’t planning to get it either. “It’s the fear of the unknown.” Burch wants more details about the vaccine’s research and longer-term side effects. She plans to wait at least a couple of months to see how co-workers respond to the shot. Until then, she’ll keep masking, distancing and hand washing. Some nurses, respiratory therapists and technicians at Loretto also are opting out, said Nikhila Juvvadi, the hospital’s chief clinical officer who was the first person to administer the vaccine in Chicago. At a staff town-hall meeting on Wednesday, she explained the science of how the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine works. -Bloomberg In Maine, 40% of staff and 30% of residents at the state's larger nursing homes won't take the jab, according to an "informal discussion" conducted by the Maine Health Care Association. "Without official polling, it’s hard to know how accurate a picture this paints, and we fully expect these percentages to increase with greater education and awareness," said the organization's director of communications, Nadine Grosso. "Ultimately, we know that vaccination is key to safely reopening our long term care facilities." And if these are all the people who will admit to refusing the vaccine, how many lied and said they will? EMTs are also at the front of the line for the vaccine, yet approximately 30% of those who travel with New York firefighters are resistant to getting it, according to Annthony Almojera, a lieutenant paramedic who's vice president of FDNY's EMS Officers Union Local 3631. https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/who-wants-be-guinea-pig-health-workers-balk-vaccine-40-staff-one-chicago-hospital-refuse
It's appears the Trump regime is totally screwing up the vaccine distribution... What Has Happened To The Promised Doses Of The COVID Vaccine? https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/what-has-happened-to-the-promised-doses-of-the-covid-vaccine Some major problems are already emerging in the initial rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, and the federal government is not providing any good answers. The early warning signs: At least twelve states are reporting cuts in their initial allocations of doses. One governor is reporting that the total number of doses projected to be available nationwide has been cut by four million monthly. The vaccine maker reports it is not having production problems and says it has doses in warehouses, but is awaiting direction from the federal government on where to send them. The combination of no production problems plus doses sitting in warehouses suggests some issue with the federal government’s oversight of the distribution of the vaccine. But it’s not exactly clear what the hold up is. The federal government has not offered an explanation for the shortfall in available doses. The reduction was announced during a “CDC/OWS all-state call” Wednesday afternoon, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Lynn Sutfin told TPM. Most disturbingly, Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker (D) suggested that the entire federal vaccine distribution effort was falling short of what had been expected. Federal officials with Operation Warp Speed have promised a monthly cadence of 20 million doses per each manufacturer per month. But Pritzker said that federal officials had told him that the Trump administration would only be able to distribute 4 million doses of the vaccine per week. He added that his state would receive half of what it has expected of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine over the next two weeks. In addition to Pritzker’s Illinois, California, Kansas, Nebraska, Maryland, Michigan, Washington, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, Oregon, and Florida have said that they expected to receive less vaccine than federal officials had initially promised, offering different reasons for why. A spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) told TPM that the “federal government delayed the number of Pfizer vaccines that California will receive in the next shipment.” The spokesperson had no explanation as to why state’s allocation had been reduced. Gov. Jay Inslee (D) of Washington state said that his state’s vaccine allocation had also been slashed by around 40 percent, without any explanation from federal officials. “This is disruptive and frustrating,” Inslee said in a Thursday tweet. Iowa’s Department of Public Health released a statement on Wednesday saying that the federal government had told it that Iowa, “as well as other states, will not receive the volume of vaccine initially anticipated.” The statement said that Iowa would receive 30 percent fewer doses than expected, and that the state was “working to gain confirmation and additional details from our federal partners.” In Nebraska, Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) said that his state had been told that its Pfizer allocation for next week would not come, “so that will be pushed off to the last week of December.” Angie Ling, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services incident commander, attributed it to a “supply chain problem,” but said that she didn’t know specifically what the nature of the problem was. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said on Tuesday that two shipments of around 450,000 doses were “on hold.” “We don’t know whether we will get any or not,” DeSantis said. “And we’re just going to have to wait.” The Florida Republican blamed it on manufacturing issues with Pfizer, but the pharmaceutical giant issued a statement denying that it was having problems in its production or delivery to the federal government. “This week, we successfully shipped all 2.9 million doses that we were asked to ship by the U.S. Government to the locations specified by them,” the statement reads. “We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses.” Under the Trump administration’s vaccine distribution plan, federal officials arrange for doses of the vaccine to reach the state level. State officials then receive the doses and distribute the vaccine locally; lack of funding for the distribution effort at the state level has stoked fears that the effort to inoculate the country will run into serious problems. But statements from state officials and Pfizer suggest that something in the federal distribution effort has led the Trump administration to scale back dose deliveries. An HHS spokeswoman did not return TPM’s requests for comment regarding the Pfizer statement, or the cut dose-rates in general. In what appears to a response to the reports, OWS denied that there had been any changes to the “official” planned allocations of the vaccine. The OWS statement came out before Pfizer announced it had doses sitting in warehouses awaiting further instructions. The lighter shipments come as Trump administration officials have set incredibly rosy expectations for vaccine distribution, with HHS Secretary Alex Azar predicting that the vaccine would be widely available to the general public by February or March. Operation Warp Speed officials contradicted that claim on Wednesday.
Still out on the hunt for the required trump distribution failures. That's a surprise. NOT. Wouldn't you think that the news here might be or at least include that the Moderna vaccine was just approved a few hours ago? Oh, I see. The script filters that out.
Maybe it's a dumb question but can I ask why neither the sitting nor prospective president and their entire administration has not gotten vaccinated yet? Tump himself might be excused as he had already contracted covid. I mean they want first responders to do it and encourage the rest of the population, why don't they be the first ones?
Should it be news? I mean an American company finally has found one, after China, Russia, Germany, UK. Is that some sort of achievement nowadays? US is 5th in the world, isn't that slightly embarrassing actually?
It sounds like Moderna's vaccine could receive emergency use authorization from the FDA within the next 24 hours. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heal...a-s-covid-19-vaccine-bringing-second-n1251552 Members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted 20 to 0 in favor of recommending authorization, with one abstention. The FDA is expected to agree with the committee's recommendation, and an emergency use authorization could come as soon as Thursday evening or Friday.