Keep Feeling Vaccination

It's not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but more likely the end of the beginning.

Pfizer announced a new COVID-19 vaccine that has achieved 90 percent efficacy in clinical trials, far more than the minimum efficacy requirement for a vaccine in he U.S., which I believe is about 70 percent.  It could get federal approval within a month.  But that doesn't mean the pandemic will end in America any time soon.  It still needs to be manufactured in large enough quantities to vaccinate as many people as possible, and the incoming Biden administration has to convince as many people as possible to get it, which could take months - say, eight or nine months at best.  So we're going to have to spend a good deal of 2021 keeping our distance from each other and going into banks dressed like we're about to rob them.

And, there's the question of storage.  Pfizer says the vaccine has to be stored at -68° Celsius, or -90° Fahrenheit.  Although it could be ready by the beginning of summer, you can imagine that it would take a lot of storage space and energy to store at ninety below a vaccine for people to get when it's ninety above outside.

Still, this is a positive step and an encouraging sign.  And it should be noted that, with other drug companies working on COVID vaccines, there could be many more opportunities for inoculation to finish off this pandemic.  But thanks to Trump making a hash out of the U.S. response to COVID-19,  as many as 800,000 to maybe 1,000,000 Americans may be finished off before it's over.  COVID cases are coming it at record-breaking daily numbers as I type this, and deaths are likely to be on the rise.  The only good news is that the COVID mortality rate continues to decline among those who have the disease - 2.3 percent at last check, compared to 5.6 percent in April.

So staffers at the White House can rest easy. 😜 (The latest victims of Trump's moronism?  Ben Carson and Corey Lewandowski.)  My advice to President-elect Biden is to have the place deep-cleaned before he moves in.  In the meantime, Mr. Biden, there's always Blair House across the street. 

The Biden White House will certainly push vaccines, as more vaccines proven to work come on line.  I hope to get vaccinated as soon as possible.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, who according to polls, is the most trusted man in America right now - a position Walter Cronkite once occupied - said he plans to get the vaccine as soon as one is ready and available, and if he gets it, certainly most other people will.  (I'm sure Walter Cronkite would have gotten one, too.)   And, to respond to the inevitable assertion from anti-vaxxers - including my friend Margrit in upstate New York - that I shouldn't put so much chemical junk in my body . . . no worries, I'm used to that.  I eat Pop-Tarts, you know. 😛

And since Pop-Tarts, like revenge, are sweet and best served cold, I feel like having one to celebrate Biden avenging Barack Obama by taking out Trump. 

Forget 2021

While it's already been said quietly and out loud, it's pretty much a done deal.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who knows more abut COVID-19 than anyone else, says that the country and the planet won't return to the status quo ante that existed before the pandemic until December.

Next December.

The vaccine should be ready by this December at the earliest, or some time in early 2021, but it will take months before it's widely available to enough people to stop it and tame it like the flu.  By the end of 2021, of course, many people will not survive it, and many businesses and cultural institutions will be gone forever as well.

So, whether Trump or Biden wins, we still have some difficult days, weeks, and months ahead. And to those of you who were hoping that 2021 would be better . . .

Eat your reality sandwich!    

Whither a COVID-19 Vaccine?

Dr. Anthony Fauci says he has seen nothing as deadly and nightmarish as COVID-19.  It's already infected seven million people worldwide, two million of them in the United States, with 413,000 deaths worldwide and 116,000 deaths in the U.S.  He also believes that the virus isn't going to simply run its course, as SARS did, and that a vaccine is going to be needed. 

COVID-19 has already devastated and upended so many of us, either directly or indirectly, that all seems hopeless three months into a pandemic that Dr. Fauci is all but suggesting will last until the end of time.  But there is a ray of hope.  Dr. Fauci has been looking at the race to develop a vaccine and he sees the possibility of not one vaccine but two or more being developed . . . and by early 2021 at the earliest.

There's a caveat, of course.  There have to be several tests and phases of testing before an effective safe vaccine can be found.  Dr. Fauci has been wrong before about this virus - he once said that you didn't have to wear face coverings if you didn't show any COVID-19 symptoms - and some skeptics insist that late 2021 or early 2022 is a more realistic time for a vaccine to be made available. Inevitably, people have been asking this one simple question - 

Can a COVID-19 vaccine be found?

Can?  Can?  It must!

A vaccine is our only way out of this mess.  We can't do the simplest thing these days without spreading or catching the virus. That includes breathing.  No amount of social distancing our staying at home is going to end this pandemic.  We must have a vaccine ready, and the sooner we get one, the better.  Failure is not an option!  Because the idea of staying six feet apart, spending most of our time at home, and wearing face coverings whenever we do go out - even when social distancing is feasible  - isn't my idea of a new norm.  It's more like a dystopia.

We need a vaccine urgently.  Maybe we couldn't go on living our lives the way we were before COVID-19 - carbon emissions and all that - but we certainly can't go on living our lives the way we're living them now.

There are 159 possible vaccines being developed.  The odds are that at least one or two of them have to be ready in a few months.