NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday is expected to approve Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine for widespread use in the country.
The decision will come as the coronavirus continues to surge across much of the world, claiming over 1.5 million lives, including over 289,000 in the U.S. alone.
If the FDA approves the drug, states can begin seeing shipments of the vaccine as early as this weekend.
Dr. Peter Salk, whose father Dr. Jonas Salk created the first polio vaccine in the 1950s, previously told WCBS 880's Steve Scott that companies need to be cautious about rushing the vaccine but needed to work quickly.
On Thursday, the two spoke again and Dr. Salk said he was confident in the medicine Pfizer has put forward.
"I was really taken aback in a sense, in a positive way, at what has happened and how quickly it has happened," Dr. Salk said. "When we spoke back in May, as you know, I was having a lot of concern about speed and fears that there might be some things would end up getting missed in the process with respect to safety and so on. But I have to say I am just feeling very positively about what has come out."
The doctor says he knows there are still millions of people in the country who say they absolutely will not take the vaccine, and he previously cautioned that the movement should not be allowed to gain anymore traction.
"If we as a country let down our guard and stop vaccinating, diseases are going to come back," he said in May.
He also says that anti-vaccination movements, however, are not new.
"I was interested to discover, only recently, that there had been a Gallup poll back in 1954, the year before the results of the large vaccine trial had been announced, and about half the people wouldn't want to use the vaccine so it's not that new of a phenomenon apparently," Dr. Salk said.
When Salk was 11 years old, he was given one of the first polio vaccines from his father and said he has no hesitations about taking one of the first COVID-19 vaccines.
"No hesitation at this point," he said. "If things change, as everyone, I'll be keeping my eye on the situation and if anything turns up that would cause me to have a different reaction to it, I'll change my mind. But, the way things looks so far, I think this is extremely promising."
Dr. Salk, however, says that the pandemic does not end with the first shipment of vaccines and people should not think they are completely safe even with the medicine.
"The one thing I would not do is, I would not roll up my sleeves have a shot and then change my behavior. I would not throw away my mask," Dr. Salk said. "I'm not going to be one of the people that relaxes until this is being used on such a wide-scale within the society that the incidence of this disease is substantially reduced if not just gone away. I think we need to be careful no matter what."
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