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... And we get to do it all again when the FDA reviews Moderna's vaccine next week. Our reporters Andrew Dunn and Hilary Brueck have been covering every development, so be sure to follow along with them for more updates this weekend and beyond.
A concern that came up among some of the "no" votes: the question asked the experts whether they'd approve the shot for Americans 16 and up. Some expressed concerns with including 16 and 17-year-olds, but a push to change the wording on the question to keep it 18 and up didn't pan out.
Now, it's up to the FDA to make a decision, one that could come shortly.
With a full picture of the safety and efficacy of Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine (with Moderna up next), questions around distribution and manufacturing are popping up.
Allana Akhtar and Shelby Livingston teamed up to get an inside look on how hospitals are planning to distribute vaccines to their frontline workers. With limited supply, it leaves tough decisions about who to vaccinate first.
Notably, how the vaccine rolls out in hospitals will inform how those institutions then prepare to vaccinate the public over the next year.
Retail pharmacy giants CVS Health and Walgreens are involved in the federal plans to administer vaccines at nursing homes. But some states like West Virginia are forming their own plans that don't rely on the pharmacy giants, Shelby reports.
Making sure there's a steady supply of vaccine doses will be no easy feat either, especially for Moderna, a company that has yet to produce an approved medicine.
Andrew took a closer look at Moderna's plans - that involve a former Polaroid factory - to get a sense of how they'll manage to pump out up to 1 billion vaccine doses.
Sometimes I think about how remarkable it is that we're hearing about safe and effective vaccines on the cusp of approval roughly a year after the virus emerged. After years of watching drug development take years to pull off, it's certainly a feat a lot of people deserve a lot of credit for.
Among those is scientist Katalin Karikó, who's spent her career trying to convince her colleagues that messenger RNA could be used to fight diseases in humans. (Both Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines rely on mRNA, as you likely know by this point.)
Andrew, Kimberly Leonard, and I rounded up some of the leaders, executives, and scientists that have had major hands in getting coronavirus vaccines across the finish line.
I'll likely be online a lot of this weekend waiting for official word on authorization. What questions do you have about what's ahead? Have you already scheduled your time to get a shot? I want to hear about it all!
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