Vaccine questions flood in
Thousands tuned in Thursday night to a virtual town hall hosted by Sen. Mike Mcguire (D-healdsburg), with panelists answering many of the public’s questions about COVID-19, and with many people showing particular interest in the vaccines becoming available.
Joining Mcguire were panelists Dr. Timothy Brewer, a practicing physician and epidemiology professor at UCLA; Dr. Matthew Willis, the public health officer for Marin County; and Lori Nazura, deputy director of planning, preparedness and prevention at the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
Mcguire said over 2,000 people watched the hour-and-a-half-long meeting live. He asked the public to submit questions by email before and during the livestream and put them to the panelists.
Mcguire prefaced the town hall by bringing attention to the current reality of a surge in California and across the country, with ICU capacity plummeting and the pandemic expected to worsen as people come together for the holidays in spite of public health orders and guidelines.
Brewer, who said he was getting vaccinated himself Friday, provided an overview of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Distribution of the Pfizer vaccine to healthcare workers has begun in California and it’s likely that the Federal Drug Administration will approve the Moderna vaccine this week. Both vaccines offer about 95-percent efficacy and are very safe, based on clinical trials.
“That’s actually terrific news,” Brewer said. “What we don’t know is we don’t know if the vaccines protect against infection, so that’s why it’s going to be so important while we roll out these vaccines that we continue to do our masking in public places, we maintain our social distancing, we stay at home when we’re sick, and we use our hand hygiene.”
Willis seconded that, saying the vaccine was not going to rescue everyone. People still need to take public safety precautions, he said, because it is unclear at this point whether someone who gets vaccinated could still infect another person. Brewer said he would describe the new normal as “like 9/11 — we’ll never go back to exactly what we were before.”
When Mcguire asked the panelists to give their best guess for when anyone who wanted one could get a COVID-19 vaccine, Brewer and Willis said maybe June, while Nazura said while it could be as early as May, it may be as late as the end of 2021.
Nezura emphasized the vaccines’ proven safety and the independent reviews that occur before vaccines are approved by the F.D. A. She said that because there is a vaccine scarcity, the state has to prioritize who should receive the vaccine first. The first phase includes healthcare workers and the next phase will include emergency workers and people in long- term care facilities.
Nezura said seniors, or people over 65 years old, were being considered to be a group in the first few tiers receiving the vaccine, but no final decision had been made yet by the state. She said all of the information she shared Thursday night could be found at covid19.ca.gov/vaccines.
Mcguire encouraged his constituents, in closing, to “stay strong” during what’s expected to be the worst few months of the pandemic.
“We’re gonna get through this, as Dr. Brewer said, but we need each other now more than ever, putting aside any differences that we may have, to be able to work with each other,” he said. “Especially in this holiday season, we all need to remain vigilant.”
A recording of the livestream will be made available at sd02. senate. ca.gov.