More than 100 million Americans could get coronavirus vaccines in the next 100 days

• Promising coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna may finally help us defeat COVID-19 by mid-late 2021.
• According to a top advisor at Operation Warp Speed, 100 million Americans could be vaccinated by the end of February.
• Dr. Fauci previously said that 80% of Americans will need to get vaccinated in order to effectively combat the virus.

The United States on Wednesday reported more than 2,800 coronavirus-related deaths, a figure which tops the previous record for deaths in a 24-hour period. Even more alarming is that the pandemic, in the wake of the recent Thanksgiving holiday, is likely to get worse over the next two to three weeks. All the while, many hospitals are already struggling to keep up with an influx of new patients.

There is, however, good news on the horizon. Both Pfizer and Moderna have developed vaccines that have proven to be 95% effective at preventing the coronavirus in clinical trials. What’s more, the first wave of vaccinations may begin as early as this month.

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The practical efficacy of any vaccine, however, is dependant on how many people take it. To this point, Dr. Fauci last month said that approximately 80% of Americans will need to take a coronavirus vaccine if we want to effectively put the coronavirus pandemic behind us.

“If we get the overwhelming majority of people taking the vaccine and you have on the one hand an effective vaccine and a high degree of uptake of the vaccine,” Fauci said, “we could start getting things back to relative normal as we get into the second and third quarter of the year, where people can start doing things that were too dangerous just months ago.”

This, of course, raises two issues. For starters, what percentage of Americans would be willing to take a coronavirus vaccine? And second, how quickly can doses be manufactured so as to vaccinate a significant percentage of the population?

With respect to the second question, Moncef Slaoui, who’s a top advisor to Operation Warp Speed, recently said that 100 million Americans could receive a vaccination within 100 days.

In a best-case scenario, Slaoui said that the U.S., by the end of February, “will have potentially immunized 100 million people, which is really more or less the size of the significant at-risk population: the elderly, the healthcare workers, the first-line workers, people with comorbidities.”

Before reaching that milestone, Slaoui anticipates that twenty million Americans will be vaccinated by the end of the year and fifty million will be vaccinated in total by the end of January.

Of course, convincing Americans to take a coronavirus vaccine is a challenge itself. “We are very, very concerned about people not taking a vaccine,” Slaoui said recently.

Recall, 49% of Americans back in September indicated a hesitation to take a COVID-19 vaccine due to fears regarding side effects. Fortunately, that number has gone down in the wake of encouraging results from both Pfizer and Moderna.

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