Who will be the first to receive the vaccine COVID-19? U.S. health officials hope to have some guidance next month on how to ration doses nationwide, but it’s a cumbersome decision.
“Not everyone will like the answer,” said the doctor. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently joined one of the advisory groups the government asked for help deciding. “There will be a lot of people who feel like they should be first on the list“, he pointed.
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Generally, the first on the list to receive a vaccine are health workers and those most vulnerable to the disease.
But Collins added new ideas to the mix: Consider geography and prioritize people from sites heavily affected by the outbreaks.
And we must not forget the volunteers of the last stage of the vaccine trial receiving fictitious injections, the necessary group to know if the real vaccines really work.
“We owe them … some special priority,” said Collins.
Huge studies planned for these months aim to demonstrate which of the several experimental COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Last week, Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. began tests that will eventually include 30,000 volunteers each. In the coming months, more calls will be made for volunteers to test vaccines made by AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax, and some vaccines made in China are in smaller studies in other nations.
For all the promises that the United States is storing millions of doses, this is a painful truth: Even if a vaccine is declared safe and effective by the end of the year, there will not be enough for everyone who wants it right away, especially since the Most possible vaccines require two doses.
It is a global dilemma. The World Health Organization grapples with the same question of who goes first as it tries to ensure that vaccines are fairly distributed in poor countries, decisions that are further complicated by wealthy nations grabbing the market for the first few doses. .
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