$30B needed to distribute vax: Schumer

The federal government must spend around $30 billion to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to hundreds of millions of Americans in the coming months, Sen. Chuck Schumer said Sunday.

Regulators at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are expected to green-light vaccines for public use in December, but Schumer warned Americans will have a hard time getting the shots if Congress doesn’t approve key funding.

“With a COVID-19 vaccine waiting in the wings, federal dollars need to follow if we are going to get this right and overcome this pandemic,” said Schumer. “States like New York will need funding to make sure the resources required once the vaccine is made available are both in place and in progress.”

The House of Representatives last month passed the $2.2 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act, which included $28 billion for vaccine distribution. The bill was pared down from a $3 trillion version the House passed in May — but the Republican-controlled Senate has failed to move forward with either proposal.

According to Schumer, the federal funds are needed to pay for health care workers, vaccination sites and a big-budget program to encourage the public to get vaccinated.

Preliminary data on trials for three different vaccines were released earlier this month, all of which showed they were more than 90% effective in preventing people from catching COVID-19, which has killed more than 265,000 people in the U.S.

It’s still unclear how long the immunity from the vaccines will last — and a slow distribution of the inoculations could cause the pandemic to drag on much longer, Schumer warned.

One COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer and the German company BioNTech must be stored at subzero temperatures and will, at least temporarily, require industrial-grade refrigerators for distribution. Pfizer has already begun to prepare the vaccine for distribution in the U.S., pending regulatory approval.

“There’s an expression: Vaccines don’t cure a disease, shots in the arm cure a disease,” said Schumer. “Getting to this point of a vaccine was hard enough... but it’s only half the work that needs to be done.”