Government’s COVID vaccine booster shot
We can’t ignore the irony that the initial fruits of the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed coincided with the Electoral College’s ratification of Joe Biden as this nation’s next president.
For both the incoming and outgoing president, it’s a victory of historic proportions.
As reported by media outlets, Boston Medical Center was among 145 sites nationwide, including five in Massachusetts, that received the first shipment of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine Monday, part of a massive government effort to halt the spread of this virus, which has killed 300,000 in this country and more than 11,000 in this state.
State health officials said that by week’s end, excluding the VA hospital, a total of 59,475 vaccine doses would be distributed to 21 medical centers.
Health care workers are first in line for the vaccine; most of the public won’t have access to this particular vaccine for months.
Pfizer’s vaccine is the first to receive government authorization for use against COVID-19, but Cambridgebased Moderna is also seeking emergency FDA approval this week for its vaccine.
Given Pfizer’s availability, Moderna’s imminent approval and other promising vaccines in the pipeline, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the White House group overseeing vaccine development and distribution, said he feels confident there will be sufficient vaccine doses to immunize the entire U.S. population.
The federal government’s commitment to the creation and delivery of effective coronavirus vaccines can’t be overstated, though many media outlets have done their best to minimize its contribution to this monumental effort.
First, they dismissed any notion that a safe vaccine could be produced within a year, fearing that feat could fuel the incumbent president’s re-election prospects. And then, when it appeared an efficacious vaccine was on the horizon, they dismissed it as a Republican-inspired Rx that no one should trust.
If the lazy-left newspapers and cable channels had done their homework, they would have known that experience with previous SARS viruses had given researchers a leg up on finding an effective antigen, thus dramatically reducing a vaccine’s traditional development time frame.
And as for government’s participation in funding and expediting vaccine candidates, media sources from the Poynter Institute to The Washington Post all have reported on its indispensable role.
Those seeking to marginalize those efforts point to Pfizer’s decision not to accept federal funding for its vaccine research.
However, the government committed $1.95 billion to assist in the mass-manufacturing and delivery of 100 million vaccine doses once Pfizer received FDA approval, providing it with an ample incentive to proceed.
And according to an article in Tuesday’s Washington
Post, Moderna developed its vaccine in partnership with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with the (federal) government underwriting the research and development of the vaccine and the advance purchase of 200 million doses, for a total taxpayer investment of $4.1 billion.
Government spending on other vaccines include Johnson & Johnson ($456 million for clinical trials, $1 billion for vaccine purchase), AstraZeneca ($1.6 billion for development, manufacturing, and delivery of its vaccine), and Novavax ($1.6 billion for latestage clinical development, large-scale manufacturing, and the delivery of 100 million doses).
In all, Congress directed at least $10 billion for Operation Warp Speed efforts, as well as appropriating other flexible funding.
We have yet to mention Donald Trump’s name, in the hope that readers wouldn’t digest these words through a visceral, politically biased lens.
No question, the criticism of his administration’s handling of this once-in-a-century pandemic was often justified.
But, so should it be praised in paving the way for the expeditious discovery of effective vaccines and providing a mass delivery system to transport those doses to where they’re needed most.