The Moderna vaccine can be refrigerated six times longer than the Pfizer vaccine. Maybe the Pfizer vaccine can be used in certain settings where there’s access to the right type of freezer and Moderna used for the rest? The logistics are dizzying. We’re talking hundreds of millions of people in the US alone.
I don’t mind standing in line outdoors if it isn’t raining (western Washington, so we’re talkin’ July 
), but the drive-through thing presents a challenge, as I can’t drive.
The ‘big long line’ model is still in very frequent use over here for kids’ vaccinations. They generally set it up in the town hall - these days you may have ‘appointment windows’ so they don’t have a hundred in line all at once, but they try to keep the line at least a bit full, for maximum efficiency
I got a mandatory flu shot while in Navy training using an injector gun. IIRC, the gun used high-pressure compressed air to inject the vaccine directly though the skin.
Then I heard a rumor (urban legend?) about some guy who flinched when he was injected, and it cut his arm open. So after that I always requested a vaccine with a needle instead (and my request was honored because by then I was in the fleet and no longer in training).
A few years later, they learned there could be cross-contamination and the spread of bloodborne diseases (like HIV) by means of splash-back, so the Navy stopped using the injector guns entirely some time before I left active-duty in 2002.
Since people figured out how to use/transport dry ice (-78 degree C) isn’t the whole logistics problem for the Pfizer vaccine a bit overblown? It is not as if there is enough of the stuff that people have to worry about storing it longer than a day or so.
Probably more practical some areas than others, also. Around here, you pretty much have to either drive something (though it may be a buggy) or be driven by somebody in order to get much of anything done at all. In cities, things are different.
But I don’t think they’re planning to get everyone done in the drive-by setup; only to have that as an option, and as a way to get a lot of people vaccinated without the vaccinators having to spend as much time on it, and without risking as much exposure before the vaccine takes hold. There will certainly have to be other options.
I don’t know about the Moderna one, but the Pfizer vaccine comes in fairly large batches, and doesn’t keep long. So I don’t expect it to be something you can just pop down to CVS and get. I think it will mostly be distributed to large groups of people, more-or-less at the same time. (Like, within a day or two.) Think blood drive, not annual flu shot.
It’s doable in developed areas with easy access to dry ice production and transportation. There are many places in the world where that is a challenge.
The Pfizer vaccine should help get a lot of people vaccinated in the 1st world.
What are we shooting for 80% or 70% vaccinated? We need like 12 billion doses to be completely back to normal.
Pfizer was talking about a billion doses I believe so that would only cover the US, UK, Canada & Ireland & Italy as an example. So if you run the logistics that way, the Cold requirement is not really a problem. It is part of the overall logistics to be solved.
what can Moderna produce? Hopefully more than a billion in the next year.
What is Russia prepared to produce of their drug and will it really work?
There are other drugs developing.
In the meantime the US is hoping to have about 40 million doses by the end of December from the pair. This will help protect the healthcare workers early.
On that part, we have 18 million healthcare workers so only 4 million doses besides that. But the doses should start pouring out in greater numbers after that.
China has several vaccines that are pretty far along. Russia has another one or two. There are two more in the US that are at least in stage 2 testing. I think India and Israel have some.
There have never been so many vaccines under development for the same bug, all simultaneously, before. There are brand new ethical problems. Is it okay to test this new one when that other one is known to work, but we can’t distribute it?
But I’m hoping that some of those vaccines are going to be feasible in places without a good cold-chain infrastructure. And I’m also self-interested enough to look at ones developed near me, and hoping i can get me one of them.
It wasn’t an urban legend, I saw it happen several times during my service time. I wasn’t surprised when they went away, we were told to lean into the “gun” to lessen the risk of moving. That was so sanitary.
Out here, we’ve got really good at waiting in line in our cars. I’d rather get shots there than risk going into my doctor’s office where sick people are.
Of course, I won’t be in the front line for vaccinations and by the time they get around to folks like me, the bugs should be worked out.
The Biden administration team seems to think that there will be some kind of distribution through the major drugstore retailers. He says in his talk today that his team is in touch with CVS and Walgreens for distribution plans of the vaccine.
Back to Thanksgiving. In that same talk, Biden says [time stamped] that the CDC recommends 5 people to be at Thanksgiving dinners with no more than 10 people with masks and social distancing if each person has been tested negative within a few days before the party.
In another article, there’s an Event Planning Risk Assessment Tool that’s supposed to calculate the risk of a gathering, depending on the size of the gathering and the location.
The article that discusses the event planning tool on a more anecdotal basis.
55,349,611 total cases
1,332,328 dead
38,493,570 recovered
In the US:
11,538,057 total cases
252,651 dead
7,019,304 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Thanks as always, Bo, for doing this day after dreary plague day, like clockwork. Appreciated.
Apparently, there’s a comma missing after “10 people”. I can see a certain segment of the population saying, “The government said only 10 people need to be wearing masks!”
That isn’t inconsistent with what I described. Your local CVS could advertise that they will be offering covid immunizations on such-and-such a date, with the second shot on so-and-so a date. Sign up now, first 900 people to sign up will be given approximate time slots when they should show up.
Maybe a plush plague doctor would make Bo feel better.
States with new seven-day-average New Case highs on November 16:
New Hampshire
Connecticut
Delaware
Maryland
Michigan
Minnesota
Ohio
West Virginia
Virginia
Alabama
Tennessee
Kansas
Montana
Nevada
Alaska
I haven’t listed the states with highs on November 15 or 14th (and there are a lot of them).
In most cases, the rate is rising in a fast exponential, and we can expect new highs tomorrow.
California appears to be poised for its highest new case rate since July.
In the beef and pork industries, if an animal suffers an injury such as a broken leg, which does nothing to harm the quality of the meat, they are still sometimes judged to no longer able to be sold. They are instead killed and they dispose of the carcass. Having some relatives in the beef and pork industry, my wife and I have been gifted a few times with perfectly good meat that a cousin didn’t want to see go to waste.