[News] COVID-19 Vaccines: Experts Answer Your Questions

[_Happy boy]

Advisory panels of infectious disease experts this week will assess a vaccine developed by pharmaceutical company Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech -- a vaccine that Britain began administering to its most vulnerable citizens on Tuesday.

The committees will then turn their attention next week to a second vaccine developed by Moderna.

Approval of either or both vaccines will begin the largest vaccination effort ever undertaken.

The transition from hazy lab science to a very real vaccine-laden needle raises many questions for Americans. But experts have some answers:

When will the first Americans get their vaccines?

U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committees will review the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine this week, and if the nod is given then the vaccine rollout could commence at startling speed, said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious disease with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.

"It could well be that the first people to get the vaccine could be within the next week or week and a half," Schaffner said.

Because Operation Warp Speed paid manufacturers to start producing doses even as their vaccine candidates underwent clinical trials, there will be stockpiles of both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines that are ready to ship the second the green light is given, Schaffner said.

Warp Speed paid Pfizer nearly $2 billion to manufacture and deliver 100 million doses, and Moderna received about $1.5 billion for 100 million doses of its vaccine.

"We've stored a lot of vaccine already. It's one of the reasons we were able to move so quickly. We didn't wait until the trials were completed to start making and storing the vaccine," Schaffner said.

Who's in charge of distributing the vaccine?

Operation Warp Speed and the CDC will oversee national distribution of the vaccine, working in conjunction with the pharmaceutical companies, Schaffner said.

However, each state's health department will identify the specific locations that will receive the vaccine prior to individuals receiving their inoculation, Schaffner said.

Because the first two vaccines are based on highly fragile messenger RNA (mRNA), they need to be kept frozen at extremely low temperatures.

"The Pfizer vaccine has to be kept so cold, almost minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, in really deep freeze, otherwise it begins to degrade," Schaffner said. "It will be going to a relatively small number of institutions, usually hospitals, where they have the facilities to deal with that and they have personnel who can be trained to administer the vaccine."

Upcoming vaccine candidates produced using more traditional methods are expected to be more hardy, and those likely will be distributed directly to pharmacies and the offices of participating physicians, Schaffner said.

How quickly can the vaccine be produced?

One advantage of the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna is that they are fully lab-manufactured, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

"It's a synthetic molecule. You just make it in the lab. You don't have to worry about growing it up in cells, as is true for more classic vaccines," Offit said.

Because of this, Offit is hopeful that large amounts of these vaccines can be quickly churned out.

"The Pfizer vaccine is a 30-microgram dose. A microgram is a millionth of a gram. You can make kilograms of this stuff," Offit said.

However, there are 7.8 billion people in the world. Even with manufacturers working at a fast clip, it will take months to produce two doses for every adult on the planet.

And the United States will have to wait in line with other nations competing for the same resource. Pfizer has told the Trump administration that, because other countries have rushed to buy up most of its supply, substantial additional doses above the 100 million the U.S. government purchased earlier this year will not be available to the United States until late June or July, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Other vaccine candidates receiving approval in subsequent months could speed up efforts to immunize everyone, but at this point it's not clear how soon those will receive their turn at bat.

U.S. officials expect to have about 40 million doses of vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna distributed by the end of the year -- just enough to immunize 20 million people with the two-dose vaccine, the Post said.

Who will get the vaccine first, and in what order?

The CDC has decided that health care workers and people working or living in long-term care facilities will be the first folks to get the COVID-19 vaccine. There are about 21 million health care workers and about 3 million people at long-term care facilities, so their inoculations will account for the first 48 million doses of the two-dose vaccine.

It's not clear who will be next in line. The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will meet in the coming weeks to make recommendations for the groups to be included in subsequent waves.

The next phase of priority vaccinations could focus on essential workers such as educators, food and agriculture workers, utility workers, police, firefighters, corrections officers and transportation employees, according to a slideshow presented at the Dec. 1 meeting of the ACIP.

This represents about 87 million people, and also would promote vaccination among minority communities that have been hit hard by the pandemic, the Post reported.