NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — The Federal Food and Drug Administration has approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, but some believe the agency has dragged its feet in the process.
According to U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, Americans "could see people getting vaccinated Monday, Tuesday of next week."
But, with nearly 300,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States alone, some believe the vaccine took too long to approve.
WCBS 880’s Lynda Lopez spoke with Dr. Julie Morita on Friday to ask for her thoughts on the FDA’s approval process.
She is the executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and was recently named to President-elect Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board.
Dr. Morita says the U.S. has a standard to uphold and thinks the FDA has been working as quickly and as safely as possible.
“The USA has a strong vaccine system that has been well established over the years to evaluate the safety and efficacy of all vaccines, all the routine and recommended childhood vaccines and adult accident, and what we're seeing play out with the evaluation of the COVID vaccine from Pfizer is the same process for evaluation that's used for all these other vaccines and it is a labor intensive, it is a rigorous and it is a thorough process – but that's why we have so much confidence when they are recommended after this process occurs,” she explains.
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Before she was at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dr. Morita was the head of the Chicago Health Department and worked extensively with communities of color and underserved communities to ensure those populations were receiving their immunizations.
She says those same communities have been hard hit by the pandemic, and she wants to help them build a trust in the COVID-19 vaccination.
“We've seen much higher rates of hospitalization, much higher rates of death among Black, Hispanic, Native Americans throughout the United States, and we have concerns that if education is not received by those groups, they may not trust the vaccine,” Dr. Morita said.
Dr. Morita says one of the most important steps in getting the vaccine to those underserved communities is helping them build trust in the immunization.
“These communities and these populations have long histories of being mistreated or experimented on in the past by the medical system and so they have reasons to not trust the vaccine, so these health departments have to really get into these communities to understand what is going on and also to identify who are the trusted messengers to reassure them the vaccines are safe and effective,” Dr. Morita said. “This work is difficult, it's challenging and [health departments] require resources and there really has not been sufficient resources that have been given to state and local health departments to do this critical work of building trust in communities.”
She assures WCBS 880’s Lopez that the Biden administration will be working to make sure that all communities have access to this life-saving drug.
“President-elect Joe Biden has made very clear that he is going to base his plans and his response to the COVID pandemic on science but also have a driven by equity,” she said. “To make sure that everyone in the United States has a fair and just opportunity to actually receive treatment, to be tested, to have access to the vaccine – and so reaching into the communities who have greater levels of distrust or have more concerns about the vaccine is a critical piece of the approach that he will be using.”
Dr. Morita says that the specific plans are currently being developed and the transition team is meeting with top health officials to get a sense of what is currently in place, so that when Biden takes office on Jan. 20, 2021, “he has a stop plan in place and we can keep moving.”
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