Sean Gardner/Getty Images(NEW YORK) Early in the pandemic, scientists and public health experts leaned on their experience with other viruses to make predictions about COVID-19, hopeful that when enough people developed immunity, the virus would be stopped in its tracks. But in the years that followed, and even after the introduction of highly effective vaccines, vaccine scientists and public health experts interviewed by ABC News realized COVID-19 is unlikely to completely disappear. Although herd immunity through widespread vaccination can be a successful strategy for certain viruses, such as those that cause smallpox and polio, scientists no longer consider it an appropriate management strategy for the virus that causes COVID-19, these experts said. Herd immunity refers to a situation where a virus can't spread because it keeps encountering people who are resistant to it. As a result, a small number of people who lack resistance can still be protected by the "herd"
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FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
Refrigerated boxes of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the Seminole County Vaccine Point of Dispensing Site in Florida, before its opening, on Monday, Dec. 28, 2020. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)
Covid-19 vaccines sit at hospitals as doctors, pharmacies await doses
WASHINGTON Stephen Nuckolls, who runs a North Carolina health care medical group called Coastal Carolina Health Care, has deep freezers capable of storing the two authorized Covid-19 vaccines and hundreds of staff ready to give it. But after two weeks of emailing the North Carolina health department, he couldn’t get a supply.
“My medical practice and many others have mostly completed our annual flu shot clinics and have staff and freezers (yes -70c) standing by to administer the shots,” he wrote in a Dec. 23 email to the Medical Group Management Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group representing independent practices. “But despite our repeated emails to
Pfizer vaccine vials contain excess doses, surprising hospitals and pharmacists By Stephen Gandel Extra doses found in Pfizer vaccine vials
Pfizer s COVID-19 vaccine appears to be in slightly less short supply than originally thought.
Hospitals around the U.S. this week got their first vials of the vaccine, which was jointly developed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and Germany s BioNTech and is the first to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Many hospitals have quickly discovered that the vials they were told contained a maximum of five doses actually contain six or in some cases even seven doses.