Originally published at: Vaccine shortage may soon become an overabundance | Boing Boing
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Good. We can ship those to countries that need them, if that becomes the case and then help them with storage, etc, if needs be.
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Even with what looks like a surplus, I’m afraid there are too many Covidiots and anti-vaxxers in the U.S. to get to full herd immunity. So let’s get all the jabs in arms we can here, but then it’s time to share with other countries as @anon61221983 suggests.
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Its a good problem I have. I just hope my ex-gets it and then my kid if that is an option in the future… what ever so I can actually hang out with her.
My dad got this second shot the other day. My mom got her second one awhile ago through a tribal resource, and so she should be protected and wants to do her water aerobics.
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This is a nice side effect that multiple countries are seeing.
A lot of places massively over-ordered doses of vaccines from several different suppliers, as at that point, nobody was sure how many would succeed in medical trials. The stunning success rate that we’ve seen, thanks to the efforts of multiple research groups means that we’re notw in a situation where these orders can be cascaded to countries that didn’t have the resources to make huge pre-orders.
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I hate to give the Trump Administration credit for anything, but Operation Warp Speed – pumping out massive amounts of vaccine on untested/unapproved vaccines so it was ready to go if it worked – was an unalloyed success.
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200 million doses is enough for 185 million people?! That would imply almost all of them were the J&J vaccine.
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That’s… kind of obvious? But this is a good thing. There are billions of people in the world who will still need vaccines in June. Later in the summer a significant chunk of teenagers will hopefully become eligible. We also may need a big chunk of the capacity on an ongoing basis if it turns out we need annual boosters to deal with waning immunity and/or variants. Even if we don’t end up needing it for SARS-COV-2 building infrastructure to manufacture vaccines seems like something handy to have around. Remember how last May a lot of experts were pointing out that we have been warned about pandemics for years, and having and maintaining capability to deal with a pandemic quickly could save hundreds of thousands of lives? That includes PPE, research facilities, academic funding structures, and capacity to manufacture vaccines.
It’s really important that we don’t let these capabilities atrophy over the next decade even when they don’t have the obvious immediate “ROI” that they do now. Unfortunately it sounds like that is already happening with PPE.
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The other big barrier to herd immunity is getting children vaccinated (there are almost 75 million minors in the united states). Approval for children is on the horizon somewhere, but I doubt my 9 year old will be eligible until at least 2022, if I had to guess at the timeline.
So yeah – things are getting better in a lot of ways, but we’re not going to be able to claim complete victory over this pandemic for at least a year, I’d wager.
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Except I am not sure it actually had anything to DO with these vaccines. IIRC Pfizer wasn’t wasn’t involved in the program. Given the need for the vaccine, producing a bunch before it got approved, while certain the clinical trials would allow for its approval, was a low risk business decision.
I mean, they do the same thing with Superbowl Merch, making tons of product for both teams, and trashing half of it that never sees the light of day.
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From what I see, there’s a big testing push now to see if the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine will do the job for children. If that doesn’t pan out, then I agree that we’re looking at 2022 at best.
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“eligible”? What does that mean?
Yeah, this really worries me. With the new variants that are resistant to vaccines (ignoring future variants that might be totally resistant), we need total vaccination to have any chance to reach herd immunity. It looks like we have enough people denying vaccines to prevent herd immunity even without the variants. This shit is just going to be endless…
Yeah, but it’s also news. Every other developed country had locked in enough doses of vaccines to have excess supply as of last year. Of developed nations, only the US, thanks to Trump, hadn’t.
And that’s optimistic. We’re going to need to convince people they need to wear masks and get vaccinated, and that’s not working out so well.
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Yeah, credit should be given that the administration didn’t block the lifers at the CDC and others that put it together.
But, really, what alternative was there? Why wouldn’t the government have chosen to massively pre-fund CV-19 vaccine development and fast-track approvals? I guess my point is: what did the Drumpf administration do that deviated from what likely would have happened under pretty much any administration?
Maybe there are things: others may likely have participated in the WHO’s “Solidarity” project. But would that have things worse? Perhaps other administrations wouldn’t have believed viable vaccines could be made so fast, and so we’s still be in an arduous approval phase. Perhaps.
I do think the program will be looked upon as a greater achievement than the Biden administration would like to admit (changing the name feels a little sour grapesy), but more than counterbalanced by the horrific incompetency in nearly every other part of the coronavirus response from 2016-20.
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Hopefully they don’t follow the food industry’s lead and destroy all surplus to keep it from the poor.
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These are the kind of problems that I want to hear from the Biden Administration. An overabundance of help and support rather than its absence or removal
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I’m assuming you know what the word “eligible” means, and that the real question is what would cause someone to not be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine.
For starters, none of them have been approved for children yet, so that’s about a quarter of the US population not eligible for that reason. Some people may also be allergic to some ingredient used in the vaccine (according to the manufacturers).
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Those of us in the reality-based community will have to get boosters every year, mask and social distancing restrictions will remain in place for everyone, and “vaccine passports” will place limits on covidiots on a small scale (air travel, local resturants and stores, hiring for some jobs, perhaps even residency in certain buildings or gated communities) and a global scale (certain countries will require proof of vaccination to cross borders). It will be an on-going annoyance in that sense.
As long as the Death Cult Party controls state governments and can obstruct federal regulations, though, the virus and variants will be spread inside the country unchecked by the unvaccinated.
I don’t think they’ll do that deliberately (if the Former Guy had won it would be a different story). However, we’re already seeing the vaccines used as a geopolitical tool of influence, which means they could easily be converted into weapons by ultra-nationalists and authoritarian regimes.
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No, there will be 200 million left over after 185 million people are vaccinated.
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We’re up to 2 million doses per day now, which means 1 out of every 18 adults in the US will get a shot this week (including my in-laws, finally), and that’s about to increase still further. At that pace I expect those 185 million people to be vaccinated by mid-June at the latest.
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