According to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins, his agency, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Academy of Medicine, will form an advisory committee that will determine where a coronavirus vaccine would be distributed.
On July 2, Collins informed a Senate panel that the group of agencies hope to have the committee formed by Labor Day, adding, “We think that might be something best done, in a circumstance, by an organization that is not itself governmental. Because it’s still the case, I think, that people are a little uneasy about the government calling the shots here,” the International Business Times reported.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has guidelines for the distribution of a vaccine:
Across categories, vaccine will be allocated and administered according to tiers where all groups designated for vaccination within a tier have equal priority for vaccination. Groups within tiers vary depending on pandemic severity. Tier 1 is the highest priority group to receive vaccination if there is limited vaccine supply for any pandemic severity.
Persons not targeted for vaccination in an occupational group would be vaccinated as part of the General Population based on their age and health status.
For the purposes of any vaccination, the CDC divides the American population into four categories: Homeland and National Security, Health Care and Community Services, Other Critical Infrastructure, and General Population.
In the category of Homeland and National Security, Tier 1 includes “the group deployed & mission essential personnel.’” In the category of Health Care and Community Services, the CDC designates “Public health personnel, inpatient health care providers, outpatient and home health providers, health care providers in long-term care facilities, and pharmacists and pharmacy technicians” as Tier 1.
In the category of Other Critical Infrastructure, Tier 1 includes “Emergency services and public safety sector personnel such as EMS, law enforcement, fire services, and manufacturers of pandemic vaccine and antivirals.” In the category of General Population, Tier 1 includes “Pregnant women, infants and toddlers 6-35 months old.”
“The Trump administration launched Operation Warp Speed, in early June, with a goal of delivering 300 million coronavirus vaccine by January 2021. Essentially, the president wants to cut the process of vaccine development, which normally takes at least five years,” the International Business Times noted.
Speaking with Collins on Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci stated of the current state of the coronavirus:
The current state is really not good in a sense that, as you know, we have been in a situation, where we were averaging about 20,000 new cases a day, and then a series of circumstances associated with various states and cities trying to open up in the sense of getting back to some form of normality has led to a situation where we now have record-breaking cases. Two days ago, it was at 57,500, so within a period of a week and a half, we’ve almost doubled the number of cases … we are still knee-deep in the first wave of this. And I would say this would not be considered a wave, it was a surge or resurgence of infections superimposed upon a baseline that really never got down to where we wanted to go.