It’s going to be a doozy when the first vaccine for the coronavirus rolls out and underwhelms the public by proving to be, at most, 50% effective in preventing infection, much like the vaccine for the flu.
Which is why, as President Trump said in an interview Wednesday, we should be praying on our knees for effective treatments and therapeutics to beat back the virus. And, sure, as an afterthought, let’s hope that a mostly effective vaccine comes along.
“If I had my choice of vaccines or therapeutics, give me therapeutics every time because I’d love to walk into a hospital and give everybody something, and they start walking out in two days,” he said on Fox News. “That’s what I’d like. Vaccine is very good longer term. But give me therapeutics, and we’re doing really good work therapeutically.”
That’s true. Since the start of the pandemic, when we were caught with our pants down, the death rate has fallen to a stunning degree. At the peak of our problem, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that nearly 19,000 people died the week of April 18. The latest data says that number for the latest week, July 18, plummeted to 690 deaths.
That’s in part due to the extreme social and economic lockdown measures states endured throughout the spring and into the summer, but it’s also in part due to rapid advancements in treatments for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, which included steroids and other medicines.
With treatment, doctors quickly try drugs on very sick people that they think will work. If they work, they keep going with the drug. If not, they cross that one out. That’s a much quicker process than looking for a vaccine to distribute on a vast scale to hundreds of millions of healthy people — and which, again, might be effective on less than half of them.
We don’t know what a vaccine will do. We don’t know the extent to which it will work or how long it will take to produce.
We’re not supposed to compare the coronavirus to the flu, for some reason, but it’s worth noting that the flu vaccine that we’re encouraged to get en masse each year has an effective rate, according to the CDC, of somewhere between 40% and 60%. So yes, Trump is still right to champion treatments over vaccines.
