With Pfizer Inc.’s Covid-19 vaccine on track to be authorized as early as next month, Western governments are facing up to an enormous logistical challenge: getting enough people shots of new vaccines.
While previous vaccination programs have spread over years and focused on specific demographics such as children or the elderly, governments are hoping to do something they never have done before and inoculate a majority of the population in a matter of months.
Even for rich nations with developed vaccination programs, that presents a host of problems ranging including building new databases to track who is getting the shot, working out ways to encourage mass uptake among younger people, ensuring adequate supply and running large-scale inoculation centers where the shots can be safely and quickly administered.
Those challenges mean that even if a vaccine is soon approved, it could be many months before it is administered to enough people to ease the need for lockdown measures that have been recently reimposed across the West.
If a vaccine arrives, “is it enough to say that life will resume as usual? I think the answer is no,” says David Salisbury, who previously chaired the World Health Organization’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization.
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