A renowned Texas vaccine expert says there's only one way out of this pandemic.
Dr. Peter Hotez is professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and dean of the national school of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Hotez is pleased there's now a national response to Covid-19 and a national vaccination plan, but it isn't enough. "This virus is always taking twists and turns, and the latest is we've got a bunch of new variants. The numbers are predicted to go back up to a new level of transmission beyond anything we've seen before. This makes vaccinating the country even more urgent."
He says the Biden plan is not ambitious enough. Hotez says the nation must vaccinate three quarters of the population to stop the spread.
Hitting that goal by Sept. 1 will require us to fully immunize about 240 million Americans over the next eight months, or 1 million people every day.
Hotez wants to get that population vaccinated by the Summer. He says the administration is trying to maximize all the sites where people can get vaccinated, and that's good. "It's still not enough. We still need additional vaccination hubs. That's one piece to this. The second part is we need more vaccine using the mRNA technology.
He thinks the European Medicine Agency will give the greenlight to the Astrazeneca Oxford vaccine Friday. "If that's the case, that has meaning for the American people because the US spent 1.2 billion dollars to get 300
million doses. Let's release it as well." He also expects the single dose Johnson and Johnson shot will come out in February.
A vaccine his team has been working is under development and he'd like to get that into the country as well. "We're going to need all that to get to the numbers. The numbers tell us that if we want to interrupt transmission, we're going to have to immunize three quarters of the US population. We need to get two doses, so we're talking about half a billion immunizations and we have to do it in five months."
That's 100 million immunizations a month.
Asked if we can do it, he said "we have to. hat's the point. We keep on hearing statements like we're worried, we think we can get to 600,000 Americans losing their life by May. I look at that and say no! When do we reach a point where we say we've got to stop documenting the deaths and say no, we're not going to let 600,000 Americans die. We are going to stop this. We're going to stop it and we are going to ramp up our vaccine initiative. We can do it and we have to do it."
