There’s increasing confidence vaccine supply can meet demand: Doctor

Dr. Howard Koh, Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Practice of Public Health Leadership at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers and Alexis Christoforous to discuss the latest on the coronavirus.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: President Biden now saying that all adults should be made eligible for a COVID vaccine by April 19. So for anyone who has a calendar handy, that is less than two weeks away. And that's about two weeks sooner than the original deadline of May 1 that he had imposed.

We've got Dr. Howard Koh joining us now. He's a professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Doctor, great to have you with us today.

So we're seeing that we're having this deadline pushed up yet again. How necessary is that right now? Or is that something that's just really nice to have at this moment?

HOWARD KOH: Well, this is great news, Kristin. And you know that we are in a race against the variants. So the more vaccines we get into people's arms, the better off we're going to be as a country and the sooner we can get to herd immunity. And this reflects the hard work of the administration and so many public health officials around the country.

When we started this whole vaccination rollout in December, less than a million people a day were getting vaccines. And now it's well over 3 million. It hit 4 million over the weekend, actually. So this is great news and great progress. But we still have to follow the variants around the world and make sure that we can put that issue behind us as well.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Doctor, the fact that more people will be eligible for the vaccine just means that there's going to be more demand. I think the question here is what about supply? I know lots of folks, even myself and my family personally, have had a really tough time securing an appointment for one of these vaccines. So does the earlier deadline signal that vaccine supply is arriving faster or ramping up?

HOWARD KOH: Yes, I think that's exactly what it means. And we have heard from the major companies, from Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J, that between the three, some 500 million doses will be available by May. So we are increasingly confident that we can have supply meet demand and really try to reach herd immunity as soon as possible.

KRISTIN MYERS: OK, so I hear what you're saying, Doctor, about at least supply of the vaccines. But I'll be very honest, myself and one of my co-workers actually tried to sign up for a vaccine appointment today. And unless I was willing to drive over 200 miles, there was no opportunities for us to be able to sign up. Is there not just a problem in terms of the supply of the vaccine itself, but also workers, nurses, doctors who are going to be able to actually administer the vaccine? Are we right now running behind our capacity?

HOWARD KOH: That's a great question, Kristin. And what COVID has done has been to make visible the usually invisible field of public health. And everybody now sees the lifesaving importance of vaccination, and then how important it is to have a public health system that takes care of issues of supplies and staff and storage and space.

Some of the timing issues that you've mentioned, Kristin, have been very frustrating to the American public. But we are making progress now. And when this is all over, I'm hoping the country will really reinvest in a strong, revitalized public health system so that we don't have to ever go through something like this again.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Now, the latest numbers from the CDC, I believe these are the most accurate, 32% of the US population has received at least one shot. About 19% are fully vaccinated. What kind of numbers are we looking at to achieve herd immunity here?

HOWARD KOH: Well, that's a matter of some debate. But the general consensus is that somewhere between 70% to 85% of the nation needs immunity in order to have what we call community protection nationwide. We have some good news also in that we are hoping to have kids-- that is, teenagers-- vaccinated by early fall because of the results from Pfizer just last week.

So if we add up all the people who need to be immunized who are adults, teenagers, and then include the people who have already been infected and hopefully have some level of immunity, that can reach growing proportions over the upcoming weeks and months. So we are really hoping that we can get to some sense of normalcy by the summer if we can outrace these variants. And also, it is really very important to keep the public health measures that we've been talking about for months in place, particularly the mask usage and the social distancing.

KRISTIN MYERS: Public health professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Dr. Howard Koh, thanks so much, as always, for your insights.