We could double the current rate of vaccinations right away. Why don’t we do that?

I didn’t bother to publish numbers today. Both the new deaths and new cases numbers took huge dips over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which are of course caused entirely by reporting offices being closed – so it’s inevitable there will be big spikes in both numbers in a few days. I’ll wait for those spikes before publishing them again. If you want to see my most recent numbers, go to my previous post. 

On Christmas Eve, the Washington Post published a stunning editorial that pointed out that the Dept. of Health and Human Services is holding back 55% of the coronavirus vaccine doses it has already received from Pfizer, when obviously these could be used immediately.

Why are they doing this? You probably know that the Pfizer vaccine requires two doses, recommended to be a month apart. HHS feels that, rather than take the very small chance that Pfizer will run into a big manufacturing problem and will have to drastically cut back production in January, they need to take an abundance of caution and hold those doses in reserve now. However, this argument doesn’t make sense.

Pfizer says that 80.2% of the immunity conferred by the vaccine will come from the first dose (and about 15% comes from the second dose). In other words, even if the people who have already been vaccinated never receive their second dose, they will still be 80% less likely to contract Covid-19 than someone who isn’t vaccinated.

The article points to nursing homes as an example. They aren’t even scheduled to start receiving the vaccine for another month. Meanwhile, 52,000 nursing home residents are contracting Covid every week (a number I find astounding, especially given all of the talk by the Trump administration of concentrating all the prevention efforts on those most susceptible to infection. It seems they’ve forgotten about that idea; Trump must have something else on his mind nowadays) and about 21% of them die. The editorial says “Getting vaccines to nursing homes a month earlier could save more than 40,000 lives alone.”

The article continues, “Defenders of saving doses say we don’t know how long immunity lasts from the first dose, so we need to make sure we have second doses available. But there will be tens of millions more doses of vaccine coming in January that can be used for that second dose, and tens of millions more in February and March for a total of 200 million doses.”

The article concludes by saying

Everyone should get their second dose. Yet even if there was a slight delay, there is no evidence it would cause any harm (though admittedly there is also no evidence it wouldn’t). The reason companies gave the second dose less than a month after the first was to ensure people in the trials actually returned for the second dose, and to get to trial results faster. But there is no scientific reason the second has to be delivered a month after the first one.

It may make sense to reserve 5 percent of the vaccine in case of distribution problems, but 55 percent is absurd and inhumane. Next year, the vaccine will become a tool for preventing future outbreaks. But right now, we have a small window in the next few weeks to save lives during the current pandemic wave. That window is closing fast. We need to get protective immunity into the population while the crisis is still going on. Instead, we are leaving millions unvaccinated in a crisis.

It is time for President Trump to step in. If he lets the HHS withhold tens of millions of vaccine doses this month, Americans will needlessly die. The president needs to order the department to release those vaccines — now.

Of course, the people remaining at HHS are probably mostly just lying low and counting the days ‘til January 20; then they’ll once again feel free to bring issues like this (which shouldn’t even require White House intervention under a normally-functioning administration) to the attention of people who can change the decision. But they’re unlikely to do anything now. So 40,000 more people will die needlessly. But let’s put that in perspective: That’s just one eighth of total deaths so far. No big deal, unless you happen to be one of the 40,000, or one of their family members.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.