“Warp speed really isn’t something I want from my medications.”
promises to have doses of a vaccine available by Jan. 1. This is still an incredibly rushed timeline.vaccine: I’m trained as an epidemiologist, and I’m accordingly cautious when it comes to SARS-CoV-2. I have spent the pandemic foisting my caution on the extended family I’ve been in quarantine with: I made my mother-in-law wash her shrink-wrapped mushrooms and refused to let my brother come over three days after getting his hair cut .
“We certainly need a mass vaccination program,” Irwin Redlener, founding director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told me. “But we need to be sure that a new vaccine is effective and safe. With the proposed short follow-up time, we won’t be seeing possible intermediate and long-term complications. Is that OK? It’s a trade-off: controlling a raging, lethal outbreak ‘now’ vs. waiting for years of safety monitoring.
That was a common theme among the other experts I spoke to: We’re now grappling with communicating the fact that vaccines are vitally important and so is the proper clinical testing process. “To be clear, vaccines save lives,” Etta Pisano, professor at Harvard Medical School and chief research officer of the American College of Radiology told me. “I just don’t want this one to be rushed out to widespread use before its safety and efficacy are proven.
That doesn’t seem likely, when a president who routinely contradicts the scientific evidence is the loudest voice saying we might have a vaccine soon. Zoya Grigoryan, an internal medicine resident at Lenox Hill Hospital, has kept her own two children up to date with the vaccine schedule laid out by the American Academy of Pediatrics—because of the high safety standards and slow, careful testing of those vaccines. Which is exactly why she’s hesitant about a COVID-19 vaccine.
For me, there is also the added wrinkle of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recent erratic behavior. The CDC is the branch of government responsible for managing pandemics and vaccine guidelines, but the boundaries between science and politics in its policies seem to be eroding.
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