It’s always darkest before the dawn, posits an old saying.
Clichés persist for a reason: they often represent the truth.
The imminent distribution of vaccines to end the coronavirus pandemic certainly promises a new dawn by next summer. All indications are that the vaccine candidates from Pfizer-BioNTech, and Moderna, will receive regulatory approval in the U.S. by the end of 2020. In clinical trials, those vaccines have shown remarkable efficacy of 95 percent. Their speedy development, utilizing a new technique involving messenger RNA, will no doubt rank as one of the greatest ever achievements in medical science.
Yes, the vaccines pose some logistical challenges, such as needing to be kept at ultra-low temperatures at -70C in the case of the Pfizer vaccine during transit. But logistics specialists in private industry, like FedEx and UPS, as well as the military are perfectly capable of figuring that out. It’s also true that in the early rollout in the U.K., some people prone to severe allergic reactions have experienced adverse reactions to the Pfizer vaccine. That needs to be watched closely but shouldn’t hamper the vaccine’s widespread distribution.
Given all that’s involved and at stake, it’s still going to take several months before enough people are vaccinated to have an appreciable impact on thwarting the spread of COVID-19. By the end of 2020, more than 300,000 U.S. citizens will have died from the disease caused by the SARS- CoV-2 coronavirus. Unfortunately, the country and the world face a dark winter before the bright dawn breaks the pandemic.
In December as this went to press, daily deaths from COVID-19 were reaching 3,000 or more in the U.S. That’s the highest level since the pandemic began. Absent widespread immunization, the only ways to check the pandemic are the public health measures that officials, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, have been pleading for everyone to observe. Avoid large gatherings, especially indoors; wear a mask when you have to go indoors, such as to buy groceries; stay at least six feet apart from other people outside your own household; and just stay home as much as possible.
By this point, it seems pointless even to point out that wearing a mask shouldn’t be regarded as some violent infringement on individual rights. It’s really just a sign that you care for the health of your fellow citizens. The idea behind all these measures has always been to prevent floods of COVID-19 cases from overwhelming hospital emergency wards which is precisely what has happened again during the waning days of 2020.
The public health measures also enable businesses to do at least some businesses as opposed to almost none under a lockdown alternative. It’s no wonder that 96 percent of business surveyed this summer by the NTEA utilized social distancing measures.
Of course, everyone is worn out from the pandemic. But it’s looking very promising that the worst will be over by next spring and that by the summer life can return to normal, even if it’s a new normal that’s a little different. To use another cliché, we can see the faint light at the end of the tunnel.
The leading edge research that culminated in the successful mRNA vaccines also promises a new approach to vaccine development, as noted in a recent New York Magazine article. That includes producing vaccines in advance for families of viruses that scientist suspect could jump from other animals to humans, as SARS-CoV-2 did.
The cost of such a program would be up to $3 billion, a fraction of the over $4 trillion the U.S. government alone as spent on relief during this pandemic.
Unfortunately, too many U.S. Republican lawmakers are already proving reluctant to provide the unemployed and other hurting citizens with the extra money they need to get through the final darks days of the pandemic. Instead, the politicians have been wasting their time trying to help President Trump convince the courts to overturn the presidential election results. As this went to press, those efforts had borne no fruit and didn’t look like they had any chance of swaying the U.S. Supreme Court either.
But that prolonged assault, and Trump’s persistent unwillingness to concede defeat, has also added to the gathering gloom because it has convinced about a third of the U.S. electorate that Joe Biden’s presidency will be illegitimate. That’s a travesty and a tragedy that is only going to make this winter of discontent that much darker until the new dawn.
