Even with a vaccine, ‘normality’ a ways off
A COVID-19 vaccine is likely to be authorized before the end of the year, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to throw away your masks anytime soon.
Rolling out a vaccine to everyone who wants one will take months in the U.S., not to mention the rest of the world.
And while vaccines are essential tools for fighting a pandemic like COVID-19, they don’t fix everything.
“People shouldn’t think of vaccines as the savior,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “Vaccines are, along with hygienic measures, a way to get in control of this virus, but we need both.”
How quickly life will get back to normal will depend on a number of factors, public health experts say, including the vaccine’s effectiveness, how many people are willing to get it and how quickly, and how much the virus is still raging out of control.
“There is an end to this,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But it will require effort on the part of the public to continue wearing masks, maintaining distance from others, avoiding crowds – and being willing to get a vaccine.
“If you have a very, very highly effective vaccine and we convince most of the people in the country to take the vaccine, we could get back to a degree of normality maybe by the end of 2021,” Fauci said.
Even if a vaccine is approved this year, there won’t be enough available to change the course of the pandemic for months, said Samuel Scarpino, an assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, who directs the school’s Emergent Epidemics Lab.
Companies already have begun making hundreds of millions of doses of their candidate vaccines, anticipating approval (and ready to throw out those same doses if their vaccine doesn’t prove safe or effective enough).
The government has promised a smooth rollout across the country, starting immediately after a thumbsup from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Pfizer, which is producing the front-running vaccine candidate, has said it will ask later this month for FDA authorization. It’s not clear how long the FDA will take to comb through the mountains of required paperwork, but many expect approval before the end of the year.
Still, it will take a while before enough doses are delivered to a drugstore or clinic convenient for the vast majority of Americans. Health care workers fighting COVID-19 will get first dibs on a vaccine, followed by first responders and the frail elderly.
“We all want our lives back,” said Dr. Mary Bassett, director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and a former New York City health commissioner. “The vaccine won’t achieve that because it can’t be distributed widely enough, fast enough.”
Then there’s the question of how many people will take a vaccine. There’s a lot of hesitancy at the moment; the percentage of people saying they’d take a vaccine fell substantially from May to September.
Public health experts hope much of that hesitation will go away after a vaccine has been shown safe and effective and community leaders start getting vaccinated themselves.
“There’s a famous line in the vaccine world that says, ‘Vaccines don’t save people, but vaccinations do,’ ” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, a professor at Harvard Medical School and an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, both in Boston.
The FDA has said COVID-19 vaccines must work at least half the time to win approval – though early signs are that they will be much more effective than that.