President Trump announced his Europe travel restrictions on March 11. It was, in my estimation, the pandemic’s unofficial beginning.
Exactly nine months later, the Food and Drug Administration issued its first emergency use authorization of a coronavirus vaccine. Sadly, a European vaccine, and other privileges aplenty, will remain out of reach for some time.
It has been a long and difficult nine months to live through, to be sure, and, naturally, a much, much tougher stretch for some more than others, though the period of time during which Pfizer’s and other vaccines were developed was exceedingly short in comparative terms. It has been a real feat.
The Wall Street Journal reported that some 145 hospitals and other sites will be in receipt of doses of the newly authorized vaccine on Monday and will begin vaccinating people shortly thereafter. It’s already happening in New York, and Kentucky’s governor expects vaccinations to begin on Monday in his state. Hundreds more locations will receive doses throughout the week.
Forget about the Electoral College. Monday is Vaccine Day, the first day of the end of this pandemic, hopefully.
The timelines were basically spot on. Not Trump’s most ambitious and wishful ones, which foretold a readied vaccine by Election Day, but his administration did command the process of development and approval in order to begin inoculating people around year’s end, as was generally predicted by Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Robert Redfield, and some others.
At this juncture, we start again to wait and wonder when, like former UFC commentator Mike Goldberg, some final authority will herald that “it is all over.” The aforementioned officials projected in September that “normal” wouldn’t return until at least mid-2021, which was depressing enough at the time.
Now that a few vaccines have demonstrated themselves functional and now that one is starting to become available, a new malaise sets in, knowing a fix is out there but that there just aren’t enough of them to go around yet. And the virus is virusing pretty efficiently, as the numbers generally show. Somehow, an end is simultaneously in sight and not in sight.
With regard to their projections, it’s probably wrong to treat public health officials as if they are akin more to sages than to governors because they can do something about it. They actually do have the authority to bind and loose, signing off on various treatments and things, crafting policies, and so forth. The pandemic’s end will, in a sense, be for them to determine in their health guidances. Certainly, there will have to be less virus going around.
Beyond that, there will have to be a general sense that it’s safe to go outside, which the public will have to decide for itself. God willing, the vaccines will bring all this about in the shortest order.
