'We just don't have enough supply to keep up with demand': Doctor on COVID-19 vaccine

Emergency Medicine Physician Dr. Seth Trueger joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down what would happen if President Elect Joe Biden invoked authorization for the production of more vaccines.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Now let's turn attention to COVID-19. President-elect Biden says he will invoke the Defense Production Act to boost COVID vaccine production, according to his advisors. Let's bring in Dr. Seth Trueger. He is Emergency Medicine Physician at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago. We appreciate your being here, Dr. Trueger. And how important do you think it would be, should the president-elect, once he is president, invoke that authorization to produce vaccine? Could it happen that quickly?

DR. SETH TRUEGER: Yeah. I mean, the details are a little tricky and a little bit beyond my expertise but this is going to be helpful. What we've seen is we're what, now eight months into the pandemic and we're still behind on PPE, we're behind on ventilators, behind on all sorts of gear. We did not use the Defense Protection Act to ramp up everything else we needed. And as we're seeing now with vaccines, we just don't have enough supply to keep up with demand. We need to get something like 600 million doses to Americans, plus to the rest of the world in order to beat the pandemic.

SEANA SMITH: Hey, Doctor, it's Seana. How has the vaccine rollout gone in your hospital, within Northwestern? Has it been smooth? Have you been able to get access to the number of doses that were expected here just a couple of weeks ago?

DR. SETH TRUEGER: Yeah. It's been pretty good overall. I think we haven't had some of the bigger problems that other places have had. I also, from what I've heard, from people who know better than me in my shop is that we've had our ethics department in charge of figuring out who goes first. So we're following the CDC ACIP guidelines and everybody else.

We've done a great job of getting front-line workers, and also not forgetting everybody who works in the hospitals-- the people who clean the floors, the residents and other trainees, everybody, not just the doctors and the nurses. And we've really had a pretty good rollout. We've given over 10,000 doses so far to our hospital staff.

It's been a little bit hamstrung by, unfortunately what seems like both the federal operational challenges and the politics, where Illinois and Chicago got separate supplies. Fortunately our organization spans both the city and outlying areas, so we've been able to get around that in some ways. I had to drive out to one of our satellite places to get my first shot. But we're doing it. We're making it work. It's an uphill climb. It's nice to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Dr. Trueger, you just mentioned your first shot. And we're hearing this discussion that perhaps one shot of the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine may be sufficient. We mentioned J&J. That's designed to be a one-shot vaccine. What do you think is the likelihood that we could see these dual-dose vaccines become single dose?

DR. SETH TRUEGER: I can [INAUDIBLE] for my friend Dr. [INAUDIBLE], who is an ICU doc in Boston, and it doesn't seem like Pfizer or Moderna think that these work as one-shot vaccines. Otherwise, they'd be testing more aggressively like this. We definitely see some sort of separation on the curves. We see some sort of effect after one dose, about a week, a week and a half out.

But the way they ran the trials and the way we're studying right now is that they are two-shot vaccine courses. It's not just a single shot. It's unfortunate because it takes twice as much supply. It takes a little logistics. I have to get another shot in another week or so. That's just how it goes. But this is what we're used to. This is how most vaccines work. There's very few vaccinations that are one and done, and that's probably part of why vaccines are more effective than natural immunity.

- Taking a look at the numbers, they continue to be extremely alarming. More than 63,000 Americans have died so far this month, the deadliest month since the pandemic began here in the US. From your perspective, from the numbers that you've seen, coupling that with some of the statistics that we're getting out from the TSA, just that we're seeing this uptick in a number of travelers, have we hit a peak yet or is the worst yet to come?

DR. SETH TRUEGER: Unfortunately it looks like these are going to keep going up for some time, especially with travel and things like that around the holiday season and the new year. Unfortunately it's going to be months before things totally turn around. Again, the vaccines are a great sign, a light at the end of the tunnel, but we're also seeing how dark that long the tunnel is going to be.

We now are having more than a 9-11 worth of deaths every day. Things are really bad. It's also not like in the first couple of surges where it was just isolated to a handful of cities. But there's basically a pandemic and just huge levels of cases everywhere, with a bunch of cities being completely pushed to the brink.

Things are really bad. They're going to get worse for a while. We are going to be doing masks. We're going to do social distancing. We're going to be basically doing everything like this for months to come, even after most people get vaccinated unfortunately, because the case rates are just so high.

- All right. Dr. Seth Trueger is an emergency medicine physician at Northwestern Medical Center in Chicago. We appreciate your joining us here on Yahoo Finance Live. We wish everybody on your team the best and a healthy and safe new year.