2 COVID Vaccines Approved, End to Pandemic in Sight??

[Merlin]

Pfizer and Moderna both saying vaccines 90%+ effective, looks like the first doses to be given in December 2020.

Likely health workers and maybe first responders first in line to get the vaccine.  Then maybe we should just start at age 100+ yr old and work our way down the age bracket till we get to 18yr old.  I heard they still need to test in children so they won't get vaccine till summer.  Most everyone should get a vaccine by around March/April.

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Do you plan on taking the vaccine?

I'd say those dates are a bit optimistic as well considering that neither vaccine even has emergency use authorization yet. Pfizer is scheduled to earn that in December or January, and the Moderna one probably won't meet the requirements until at least a few weeks later. They need to manufacture enough for everyone too. It sounds like Pfizer will be able to make 20 million doses a month to start and ramp up from there. So first responders, doctors, teachers, and the military will probably get access to the vaccine in early 2021 and everyone else will get access in the late spring or summer. It will probably be fall before everyone who wants the vaccine will have access.

Hopefully, it will go faster than that with two providers, but that is the timeline that experts were pushing recently.

Of course, that doesn't include all the people who are going to hold off on taking either of these vaccines until we have proof that they are safe. We're not anti-vaxxers, but we're not going to be the first in line for what is effectively an experimental treatment. We want to see how this shakes out in the general population before we sign up. Maybe one of the other vaccines will prove to be safer and more effective. So we're planning to keep sheltering as much as possible over the next 12-18 months and look at getting vaccinated once we have more widespread evidence of safety and efficacy.

Both these vaccines use mRNA which has never been approved for use in humans as far as I know.

We don't know yet if taking this vaccine will lead to permanent or temporary immunity for COVID. 

“When you look at the history of coronaviruses, the common coronaviruses that cause the common cold, the reports in the literature are that the durability of immunity that’s protective ranges from three to six months to almost always less than a year,” Dr. Anthony Fauci

As we see how the vaccines play out in the general population over the next year we should have a much better idea of the durability of these vaccines.

My guess is that we're going to need to get booster vaccinations every 6 months to start, and then annually for the next decade or so until we're sure that it has been eliminated from circulation anywhere in the world. Of course, this also assumes we eventually manage to get 100% worldwide vaccination coverage in a short period of time, so that may be overly optimistic.