Most Americans may have to wait until mid-2021 for coronavirus vaccine, CDC director says

The director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has projected a gloomy timeline for the mass deployment of the coronavirus vaccine in the US, saying it will not be available to most Americans until roughly the middle of next year.

“If you're asking me when is it going to be available to the American public so we can begin … to get back to our regular life, I think we're probably looking at late second quarter, third quarter 2021,” CDC Director Robert Redfield testified before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday.

Mr Redfield said there should be a viable vaccine available “sometime between November and December,” but that it will be in “very limited supply and will have to be prioritised” for people in vulnerable age groups and with pre-existing conditions.

The CDC director’s projection — which is in line with previous timeline estimates from Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert — puts a damper on the Trump administration’s more optimistic pronouncements about the Covid-19 vaccine in recent days.

For instance, Paul Mango, the deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, told Bloomberg in an interview this week that he expected every American to be able to get a vaccine by the end of March 2021.

Donald Trump said on Tuesday at his town hall on ABC News that he expects the Food and Drug Administration to approve a vaccine within the next three to four weeks, just in time to promote before his 3 November Election Day matchup with Democrat Joe Biden.

Health experts and Democratic lawmakers have sounded alarms about Mr Trump’s public statements, accusing him of exerting political pressure on scientists at the FDA to cut corners in their pursuit of a safe vaccine in order to boost his own election odds.

Mr Trump has previously accused a mysterious “deep state” of intentionally delaying the approval of a vaccine candidate to hurt his re-election campaign.

The president has provided no proof of such a conspiracy, and scores of health officials and scientists have said it would be a monumental achievement to develop and distribute hundreds of millions of effective vaccine doses to Americans on the timeline projected by Mr Fauci and Mr Redfield.

The Trump administration on Wednesday issued an outline to Congress and a “playbook” to states and local governments for its plan to distribute millions of vaccine doses across America later this year or early next year when a candidate is approved.

The plan to inoculate the US population from the coronavirus — which has cost taxpayers billions of dollars as the Trump administration has sought to expedite testing and mass production — hinges on Americans actually going to get their shots, as the government will not enforce vaccination.

Mass vaccination would not happen all at once, but rather in multiple phases, according to the Trump administration’s playbook.

In the first phase, health care workers, essential employees, and Americans in vulnerable age groups and with preexisting conditions would receive the vaccine. The programme would then open up to all Americans in the second and third phases, according to the plan, a process that would likely take months. For most vaccines, Americans will need to receive two doses, 21 to 28 days apart, from the same drugmaker.

The federal government has left it up to states and local governments to formulate their own plans for storing and distributing the vaccine doses. They must submit those plans to the feds a month from now.