Scott Gottlieb is a physician, medical entrepreneur, Republican, former Commissioner—under Trump—of the Food and Drug Administration, and a frequent news show guest on Covid-19 and the vaccines. This morning the conservative talk show regular hit my liberal nerve with a call to vaccinate the “willing.”
It has seemed to me for some time that a primary public health task right now is to get as many people as possible vaccinated. Yes, it’s nice to have priorities, nice especially to get health care providers who are in the midst of the fight, vaccinated first. I think that the priority lists are still fine, but that little time should be spent trying to convince the anti-vaxxer nurse or the doctor who is still doubting the testing and waiting on more definitive results.
Roll out those vaccines; get them to states and hospitals, and then into the arms of the willing. If the science is good—and I am not a science always has the right answers guy—the checks and balances, the accounts across national and private/public agency lines, all indicate that we’ve got a good chance of pulling off another Salk-Sabin-Polio win.
Joe Biden has a plan to vaccinate 100 million in the first hundred days of his administration. He’s proposing money for states, money for a propaganda campaign to convince the public that vaccination is safe and efficacious.
But the most important thing that he has already done is get himself and VP Harris publically vaccinated. Now our job is to follow the very public Biden-Harris model, and line up to get the shots. Docs and nurses first—if they want it; nursing home staff and patients—the volunteers; and then folks like me, over 65 or 75 or whatever number they want to pick—the wiling.
I’ll be in that line. Hope you—or your parents, uncles, and grandmothers will be there with me. With longer days and the sunshine of a new health team and attitude at the top, we might just make 100 million by tax day in April.
# # #
No comments:
Post a Comment