Pence Tells Governors First Vaccine Deliveries Are Expected December 15

A massive caveat to this: The administration has no control over what the FDA does, and if the FDA doesn’t grant the emergency use approval, no vaccines are going anywhere.

But the FDA is meeting on December 10, and already has all the data it should need to make a decision. Given that both Pfizer and Moderna showed 95 percent effectiveness and no serious safety issues – and given the urgency with cases spiking right now – it’s almost inconceivable they won’t at least grant the emergency approval.

And that seems to be what everyone expects:

“We strongly believe the vaccine distribution process could begin as soon as the week of December 14,” Pence said, according to audio of the call obtained by CBS News. “With this morning’s news that Moderna is joining Pfizer in submitting an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), we continue to be on pace.”

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn didn’t commit to the December 14 date, but he did say the agency would make a decision regarding Pfizer’s EUA after an outside panel of experts meets to review Pfizer’s application on December 10. Hahn described the FDA’s process in evaluating the vaccines for emergency use. “We do all the number crunching ourselves,” he said. “We look line by line by line on all the data, on all the patients and manufacturing. We do statistical analyses and we come to our own conclusions to support a decision of either thumbs-up or thumbs-down.”

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The meeting agenda obtained by CBS News says the first vaccine deliveries, by Pfizer, are planned to take place on December 15, and the first Moderna vaccines are estimated to be delivered on December 22. 

Pfizer would be a week ahead of Moderna because it was about a week ahead in reporting its findings. That’s not a negative for either company because the federal government is going to coordinate the logistics, and will factor the addition of the second vaccine into its broader plan.

Still being discussed, however, is how the recipients of the vaccine will be prioritized. There is debate within the administration over whether the first doses should go to those 65 and older or to front-line health care workers.

The 65-and-older group is the most at-risk, so vaccinating them first would make it less of an issue if the rest of the population is exposed. But the front-line health care workers have the greatest potential to spread the virus, because they not only come in contact with so many infected people, they also turn around and subsequently come in contact with lots of other people.

Prioritizing the front-line health care workers would likely do more to slow the spread. Prioritizing the elderly would likely do more to reduce the death rate. Which one do you choose?

If it was up to me, I think I would go 1) 65-and-older; 2) Front-line health care workers; 3) Everybody else. That’s because vaccinating the people most likely to die from the virus completely changes the game as far as what the virus represents. If people 65 and older are vaccinated, then COVID becomes a severe case of the flu for everyone else. It’s nasty but it’s very unlikely to kill you. If that was the case from the beginning, we would never have had all the lockdowns.

But I can see the argument for front-line health care workers going first, since they have to be exposed to infected people – it’s their job – and they do have so much potential to spread the virus.

There’s probably no one right answer that’s definitively correct. In a situation like this, you exercise the best judgment you can. I hope whatever the Trump Administration decides doesn’t get turned into a partisan brawl. That’s a hell of a thing to hope for in America 2020.