As healthcare workers and nursing home residents get inoculated against coronavirus, US vaccination experts debate who should be next: essential workers or those above 65 and patients with certain conditions
World War II Navy veteran Lawrence Doyle, 94, receives a COVID-19 vaccination at a care facility on December 17 in Washington. PIC/AFP
The US COVID-19 vaccination campaign has begun, and the few available doses are mostly going into the arms of healthcare workers and nursing home residents.
But what about in January, February and March, when more shots are expected to become available? Who should get those doses? A federal panel of vaccination experts takes up that question at an emergency meeting this weekend. No matter what the committee decides, there will be differences from state to state.
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Essential staff or elderly?
The panellists are leaning toward putting "essential workers" first because bus drivers, grocery store clerks and similar staff can't work from home. They are the people getting infected most often, and where concerns about racial inequities in risk are most apparent.
But other experts say people aged above 65 should be next, along with people with certain medical conditions. Those are the people who are dying at the highest rates, they say.
Vote on Sunday
The group is scheduled to vote on the proposal Sunday, one day after it discusses a vaccine made by Moderna. "I think we know this isn't going to be perfect. We don't have vaccine for everyone right away, so we're going to have to make difficult decisions," said Claire Hannan, executive director of a body that represents the managers of state vaccination programs. The advice of the expert panel is almost always endorsed by the CDC.
'COVID three times more deadly than flu'
A study published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine on Friday confirmed that the new coronavirus is worse than seasonal flu, showing a death rate almost three times higher among COVID-19 patients. Some 16.9 per cent of COVID-19 patients died between March and April, whereas 5.8 per cent death rate from flu was recorded from December 2018 to the end of February 2019.
Many states told to expect far fewer doses next week
Several states say they have been told to expect far fewer doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in its second week of distribution, prompting worries about potential delays in shots for health care workers and long-term care residents. But senior Trump administration officials on Thursday downplayed the risk of delays, citing a confusion over semantics, while Pfizer said its production levels have not changed.
Half of Belgium's COVID-19 deaths in rest homes
Nearly 10,270 elderly people living in Belgian rest homes have died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. Yves Van Laethem, a spokesman at Belgium's coronavirus crisis centre, said on Friday that these deaths accounts for 56 per cent of all the victims. One of the hardest-hit countries in Europe, Belgium has reported more than 618,000 confirmed virus cases and 18,371 deaths linked to the coronavirus.
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