The carrot or the stick. This hospital in Houston is taking the carrot approach (for now). Houston hospital offers workers $500 to get COVID-19 vaccine https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-houston-hospital-500-dollars/ Houston Methodist Hospital's 26,000 workers can look forward to some extra cash in March — as long as they get a COVID-19 vaccine. The hospital's president and CEO, Dr. Marc Bloom, told employees in an emailed letter last week that they can look forward to a $500 bonus as a "thank you for your perseverance throughout a difficult 2020." Eligibility criteria to receive the award include getting a COVID-19 vaccination, "fulfilling our obligation as health care workers to lead the community," he stated. The hospital also gave employees $500 bonuses about six weeks ago for their work during the pandemic, which has killed nearly 353,000 Americans. Houston has been hit particularly hard, with nearly 2,700 deaths and more than 247,000 confirmed cases in surrounding Harris County. Employers, including health care providers, face a balancing act in getting their workforces vaccinated. For now, vaccination isn't required for Houston Methodist employees, but "will be eventually" for most workers, Bloom wrote. Although many companies are stopping short of making the shots mandatory, they have the right to require immunization for most workers under recently passed federal employment guidelines. "I think people are more wanting it than not wanting it," said a spokesperson for Houston Methodist, who received her second dose of the vaccine on Monday. There's at least anecdotal evidence of reluctance among some health care workers to get the shots, with Dr. Joseph Varon, chief of critical care at Houston's United Memorial Medical Center recently relaying concerns among nurses in his unit to NPR. Concerns about COVID-19 vaccines is highest among African Americans, according to Pew Research Center, which recently found that fewer than half of Black adults planning to get vaccinated, versus 60% of Americans overall who intend to get the shots. African Americans have less trust in the medical system than White patients, and often receive worse care, studies have found. In part, that reflects the history of medical mistreatment of Black Americans, including experimental operations on enslaved Black women between 1845 and 1849 by Alabama surgeon J. Marion Sims as well as the infamous Tuskegee Institute experiments in the 1930s that examined the progression of syphilis in Black men. Fears that political considerations could overrule safety concerns, particularly when it comes to African Americans, drove the nation's oldest Black physicians group to form a task force to track the data as drugmakers developed vaccines. The group last month voiced its support for the two vaccines currently being distributed. Some expert have backed the idea of offering employees a financial incentive for getting inoculated against COVID-19. "The 'adult' version of the doctor handing out candy to children, fortunately, points toward a solution: Pay people who get the shot (or shots, since more than one may be required)," Robert Litan, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in an August opinion piece for the Washington think tank. "How much? I know of no hard science that can answer that question, but my strong hunch is that anything less than $1,000 per person won't do the trick." But other economists say such payments could backfire, citing studies that suggest offering money in exchange for getting vaccinated could lead them to conclude that the shots are risky.
The FDA said "no" FDA says people need both doses of coronavirus vaccines https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/04/health/fda-coronavirus-vaccines-doses/index.html Anyone who receives the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine must get two full doses, two top US Food and Drug Administration officials said Monday. They also dismissed other ideas for stretching the vaccine supply and said people who are speculating about the possibility of making do with just one dose or cutting doses in half are misinterpreting the data. "We have been following the discussions and news reports about reducing the number of doses, extending the length of time between doses, changing the dose (half-dose), or mixing and matching vaccines in order to immunize more people against COVID-19," FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn and Dr. Peter Marks, who heads FDA's vaccine division, said in a statement. "These are all reasonable questions to consider and evaluate in clinical trials. However, at this time, suggesting changes to the FDA-authorized dosing or schedules of these vaccines is premature and not rooted solidly in the available evidence. Without appropriate data supporting such changes in vaccine administration, we run a significant risk of placing public health at risk, undermining the historic vaccination efforts to protect the population from COVID-19," they added. Operation Warp Speed's top adviser, Moncef Slaoui, told CNN Sunday that the FDA would consider giving half-doses of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine to people 18 to 55 -- which could make the vaccine available to twice as many people in this age group. Slaoui said earlier data show that the vaccine appeared to elicit effective antibody responses among volunteers under age 55 who received either the full 100-microgram dose or a half dose. While an FDA briefing document last month also references these "comparable" immune responses from Moderna's phase 2 study, the full data have not yet been published. But Marks and Hahn said these findings covered only a very few people who were not followed for long to see if their immune responses held up over time. "What we have seen is that the data in the firms' submissions regarding the first dose is commonly being misinterpreted. In the phase 3 trials, 98% of participants in the Pfizer-BioNTech trial and 92% of participants in the Moderna trial received two doses of the vaccine at either a three- or four-week interval, respectively," they wrote. "Those participants who did not receive two vaccine doses at either a three-or four-week interval were generally only followed for a short period of time, such that we cannot conclude anything definitive about the depth or duration of protection after a single dose of vaccine from the single dose percentages reported by the companies." British officials have said they will allow more than 21 days between doses of Pfizer's vaccines and would consider allowing people to get vaccinated with two different vaccines. Hahn and Marks dismissed these ideas for the US. "The available data continue to support the use of two specified doses of each authorized vaccine at specified intervals. For the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, the interval is 21 days between the first and second dose. And for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, the interval is 28 days between the first and second dose," they wrote. It's understandable that people may want to stretch the vaccine supply, they said. But it's not advisable. "If people do not truly know how protective a vaccine is, there is the potential for harm because they may assume that they are fully protected when they are not, and accordingly, alter their behavior to take unnecessary risks," they said. Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN he thought cutting vaccine doses in half was a bad idea. "There's no data on efficacy of a half dose. If you use a half dose, you're just making it up. You're just hoping that you're right,"added Offit, a member of the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. "Why would you dare to make up something when you don't know whether or not it works?" Dr. Arnold Monto, who was acting chair of the committee during the meetings last month to consider Moderna's and Pfizer's vaccine applications, told CNN Monday that cutting the dose would be out of the ordinary. "This would be a very unusual step, given the fact that this was not studied in Phase 3, but emergency use is also a very unusual step," said Monto, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan.
I don't think we need to go there right now. The issues are about distribution and vaccine reluctance. Having said that, as usual, I think the FDA could turn its burner down a little and stop being dismissive by suggesting that it is outlandish to even look at it and that there has not been any investigation into it. Stay with your standards, but don't be a pompous, dismissive arse. It is entirely proper to have that discussion and some are. Everything can be talked about. I think for example that the FDA needed to resist political interference, nevertheless, they also have thrown the baby out with the bath water in a few places. They could have easily entered into a "rolling review" process as the Brits did whereby the regulators reviewed incoming data at the same time as the pharma researchers did and shaved about three weeks off the process without any loss of real integrity to the process. Researchers from Yale School of Public Health Single dose of the vaccine may be better than nothing at all https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-01-dose-vaccine.html
Dr Fauci predicts the U.S. could return to 'some degree of normality' by early FALL but only if vaccine distribution speeds up - and says 1 million shots a day could soon be administered Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted Tuesday that 280million Americans could be vaccinated for COVID-19 by the fall if distribution speeds up He said this would be the number required to hit herd immunity Fauci claimed if the distribution is ramped up to meet this goal, life could return to 'some degree of normality' by early fall He also predicted that the U.S. could soon be giving at least a million COVID-19 vaccinations a day The initial rollout has been slow, frustrating health officials and governors The nation is currently only vaccinating roughly 500,000 people a day Fauci said the impact of the vaccinations may be seen by the spring but there could be a difficult few weeks with post-holiday surges in cases https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9116061/Fauci-US-soon-1-million-vaccinations-day.html Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted on Tuesday that life in the United States could begin to return to 'some degree of normality' by early fall but only if COVID-19 vaccination rollout increases rapidly. The nation's top infectious disease expert said that by fall, he hopes that 280 million people will have been vaccinated, the predicted number needed to reach herd immunity. He added that if vaccinations begin at a stepped-up pace soon, the impact on new infections could even be seen by the spring, but predicts several more difficult weeks with post-holiday surges before this takes effect. Fauci claimed that the U.S. could soon be giving at least a million COVID-19 vaccinations a day despite the current pace only just having reached roughly half of that number.
Those numbers will start ramping up because some of the lefty states are deliberately sabotaging the roll out because they want the numbers to explode when Biden is inaugurated. Exhibit A below: Gov. Kate Brown promises swifter COVID-19 vaccination rate amid criticism that 75% of vaccines are sitting idle https://www.oregonlive.com/news/202...ism-that-75-of-vaccines-are-sitting-idle.html
Pfizer vaccine protects against UK and South African Covid variants, research suggests https://www.standard.co.uk/news/wor...ts-uk-south-africa-covid-variant-b757501.html
It is not necessarily a show stopper even if it does not. Means they would need to retool and upgrade the vaccine as they do for the flu by inserting the cell material from the new strain and maybe mixing with some from the other prevalent strains, as is done for the flu. Couple of the pharma companies have said that it would be about a six week process which presumably you would be working on ahead of time if the strain varies enough to make it worth it. So far, not yet. And the FDA has already offered the reminder that "strain changes" so called do not necessarily involve starting from scratch for trials and approvals, as is the case with the flu. Strain changes are approved routinely every year without a big process.
Local authorities like Cuomo, Newsom, Pritzker are mucking it up so that Trump can get no credit. DeSantis and Noem though doing well. Leftists are disgusting.
The failure of federal and state distribution systems coupled with the failure of local governments and medical systems inability to staff up to a level needed to quickly vaccinate people.