Gov. Gavin Newsom has admitted that the rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations in California has been too slow.
Last week, he said the state received about 1.3 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. About one-third of them had been administered.
"I think most people would argue that it’s a logistics and implementation challenge," Dr. Chaz Langelier, Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the UCSF Department of Medicine, told KCBS Radio's "As Prescribed" program. "The scale of this effort is unlike really anything we’ve seen before. So, it’s just a truly massive amount of implementation that has to happen to get not only vaccine to states and to hospitals and to clinics, but also people available to inject that vaccine into individuals."
But, Dr. Langelier said he believes distribution will speed up, and reassures recipients that both mRNA vaccines have been shown to be safe and 95% effective.
"Unlike older types of vaccines, these do not involve injecting any actual virus into a person," he explained. "It’s just a piece of nucleic acid that encodes production of a small piece of a virus. So, there’s no way for a person to actually get infected from a vaccine, and that’s a really important concept."
Dr. Bryn Boslett, a physician who specializes in infectious diseases and Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSF, added she's not concerned that the vaccines were developed more quickly than other vaccines.
"It’s true these vaccines were developed at record speed, which is really a miracle," Dr. Boslett said. "But I don’t think that that’s a cause for concern. The reason these vaccines were developed so quickly is that, unlike many other vaccines, this particular effort had a lot of funding and backing from governmental sources and other sources."
She said, among other things, that funding helped get people enrolled in the trials quickly.
"Another thing that really helped these vaccines along faster is that we’re not using a live virus for these vaccines," Dr. Boslett said. "So, we don’t have to grow the virus in order to produce more vaccine, and that limits the duration of production as well, also helping things to move along much more quickly."
One things that remains unclear after the initial trials is whether the vaccines prevent people from spreading the virus.
"It’s possible that people might become infected at low level, but at a level sufficient enough to transmit to others. We simply don’t have enough data yet to really understand this," explained Dr. Langelier.
That's part of the reason that Dr. Boslett said it will still be a while before life can return to what it was before the pandemic.
"I’m hoping that maybe by the fall, or by certainly winter, we might be able to start doing that," she explained. "But I really have to caution people that for time being, these cases are surging around the country. Even though vaccine is 95% effective, it’s going to be a while before most of us have been vaccinated. So, that herd immunity that people sometimes talk about is not going to happen for a while, and 95 % also is not 100%."
Dr. Boslett went on to say that "we don’t actually know if this vaccine prevents asymptomatic viral shedding. So, for all of those reasons, I would say even if you’ve been vaccinated please try to keep maintaining all of those things we know work - the masks, the distancing, the hand washing, and everything we know that we need to keep doing - for at least a little while longer."
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