The first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine should go to healthcare workers and residents of long-term nursing homes, a panel at the Centres for Disease Control voted Tuesday.
With a COVID-19 vaccine coming as soon as mid-December, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an independent panel advising the CDC, voted 13 to 1 to recommend those two groups as the first in line due to their high risk of contracting the virus. The recommendation now goes to the CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, for his approval to make it the federal health agency’s official guidance.
The 21 million healthcare workers and 3 million residents and staff of nursing homes in the U.S. are at “exceptionally high risk” and therefore the priority for receiving the vaccine, the chair of the ACIP, Dr. Jose Romero, told CNN.
Though states are preparing for delivery and distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine around Dec. 15, one has not yet been approved in the U.S. Two companies — Pfizer and Moderna — have submitted theirs to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization. Both companies say that human trials of their vaccines have shown them to be highly effective, and have prevented COVID-19 infection in about 95 percent of their volunteers. Pfizer’s vaccine was approved for use in the United Kingdom on Wednesday morning.
One member of the panel, Beth Bell, a global health expert at the University of Washington, told the Washington Post that they are voting at “a particularly difficult time” in the pandemic with cases soaring out of control.
“There is an average of one covid death per minute right now,” she said, adding that during their four-hour meeting at least 180 people “will have died from covid-19, so we are acting none too soon.”