The Daily - The U.S. Approves a Vaccine

The Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use on Friday, clearing the way for millions of highly vulnerable people to begin receiving the vaccine within days. The authorization is a historic turning point in a pandemic that has taken more than 290,000 lives in the United States. With the decision, the United States becomes the sixth country — in addition to Britain, Bahrain, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico — to clear the vaccine. Today, we ask the science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. what might happen next. Guest: Donald G. McNeil Jr., a science and health reporter for The New York Times. For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the latest edition here. Background reading: Pfizer has a deal with the U.S. government to supply 100 million doses of the vaccine by next March. Under that agreement, the shots will be free to the public.The vaccines are on their way, but experts still say a difficult winter of coronavirus infection and death lies ahead. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily

Duration: 35m
Broadcast on: 14 Dec 2020
Audio Format: other

The authorization is a historic turning point in a pandemic that has taken more than 290,000 lives in the United States. With the decision, the United States becomes the sixth country — in addition to Britain, Bahrain, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico — to clear the vaccine. Today, we ask the science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. what might happen next.

Guest: Donald G. McNeil Jr., a science and health reporter for The New York Times.

For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the latest edition here.

Background reading:

Pfizer has a deal with the U.S. government to supply 100 million doses of the vaccine by next March. Under that agreement, the shots will be free to the public.
The vaccines are on their way, but experts still say a difficult winter of coronavirus infection and death lies ahead.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

this podcast is supported by TikTok. Sometimes the most interesting discoveries are the ones you weren't looking for. That happens every day on TikTok. A science experiment can spark a whole new interest. A recipe you stumble upon can become a meal you make for the people you love, and a restaurant you've never heard of might become your new favorite spot. That's the thing about TikTok. Follow your curiosity and see where it leads. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bolvaro. This is daily. Today, the United States has granted emergency authorization to Pfizer's vaccine for the coronavirus, a turning point in the pandemic. I spoke to my colleague, science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. on what happens next. It's Monday, December 14th. Donald, I just want to start by getting your reaction to this news, the fact that we now have an approved vaccine for the coronavirus in the United States. I think it's great. This is what we've been waiting for. This is the way out. We're not getting out through masks and social distancing and all the other steps that countries like China took, so we're going to have to get out through pharmaceutical means. Unfortunately, this is step one. We're going to need several vaccines, but several vaccines are on the way. This was our, in some ways, first and last best hope, and it has happened a heck of a lot faster than I think many of us, including when I first began speaking to you back in February and March, you thought was going to happen. Yeah, the record was four years. I thought maybe we could cut that in half, but we're doing much better than that. I mean, we've got a vaccine out in less than a year. It's amazing. And it shouldn't take too long for other vaccines to come out because the epidemic is raging so fast right now that the phase three trials of other vaccines ought to go quite quickly. Well, I want to talk about the fact that the pandemic is still raging in such an out of control way and where that is going to leave us during this weird interlude between approval of the vaccine and the vaccine actually reaching lots of people. And I wonder just how dark you think this is all going to be during this kind of interperiod. I think we are in the valley of the shadow of death. It is really dark. We know the sun is going to come up over a mountain at the other side of the valley, but it can't rise fast enough. Right. You have invoked this very dark biblical reference, but how deep and dark will this valley of the shadow of death be? Do you think? Okay. We're now seeing more than a million new cases a week, new confirmed cases. So presumably, there's more that we aren't testing. We have more than 100,000 people hospitalized and it's growing. We have about 3000 dead a day, which is almost an impossible figure to absorb. Yeah. Well, that's about how many people died in 9/11, that's about how many people died at Pearl Harbor. That's more than people die of cancer or heart disease each day, what we're normally the two biggest killers in America. And if nothing changes, we're on track for 500,000 dead by the end of winter, unless we have a giant change of heart as a country. So are we in the really awful place that we are in right now? Partly because of the Thanksgiving holiday, partly because as we saw in many televised images, people did travel. Is that part of what's going on here? Yes. TSA figures show that about 40% as many people came through their airport checkpoints this year as last year on Thanksgiving week. So 40% of a normal, very high travel week is a lot of people. Yeah. So and many of those people gathered together in houses and there was clearly a lot of transmission. And we're now a little bit more than two weeks beyond Thanksgiving. And normally, if you get infected, usually one week till you show symptoms, two weeks till you show hospitalization. And then usually it's three to six weeks before death. So we expect the deaths to keep going up. And if nothing changes, we might go through this again at Christmas time and Christmas isn't very far away. A surge upon a surge is what Fauci calls it. And he's right. That's extremely depressing. Yep. I'm curious how you would Donald describe this period that we are in when it comes to the government's approach to the virus. Because it feels like both at a national level and at a local level in many places, there's not really any effort to keep people from behaving the way that they are beyond rhetorical guidance. There are a few

Transcription truncated.