Good afternoon, readers.
Say you stroll right into a hospital or different COVID vaccine distribution website. You qualify to get one since you’re a precedence group beneath native rules, and there are sufficient obtainable doses round so that you can get one. Which one would you really obtain?
The Meals and Drug Administration (FDA) has already granted emergency authorization to 2 of them, one from Pfizer and its German accomplice BioNTech and the opposite from Moderna. However you’re unlikely to know which one of those you’ll be getting.
This pandemic has had a unifying theme: Triage. You get the assets to who wants them most. You allocate such assets accordingly. That was the case with coronavirus testing at the start of the outbreak. Now it’s the case for one of the complicated immunization campaigns in historical past.
Whereas the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines share scientific roots, they’re nonetheless very totally different merchandise with totally different logistical necessities equivalent to storage and dosing (although they’ve been proven to be equally efficient in scientific trials). However location will almost certainly dictate precisely which shot you obtain.
Reside close to a significant, sprawling, subtle well being system? You may get Pfizer’s vaccine, which has ultra-cold storage necessities {that a} smaller hospital could not have the instruments to handle. Reside in a rural space? Maybe Moderna’s vaccine, which doesn’t require these extra specialised capabilities.
Conserving monitor of all that is key since mixing up two totally different vaccines could possibly be harmful (a truth which has compelled well being techniques to work with digital well being document distributors to keep watch over who’s getting what).
All of it boils right down to flexibility, and extra vaccines will ultimately arrive to the market. However the disparate methods for COVID vaccine deployment might additionally breed some confusion.
On a associated be aware, the worldwide pandemic has uncovered deficiencies in well being techniques in every single place and has highlighted the significance of advancing with extra patient-centric options.
What’s extra, the transformative spirit and pace of change—from therapeutics to the latest vaccine growth and deployment—have demonstrated that well being techniques may be extra environment friendly in assembly calls for at this time and tomorrow. You can join Fortune for a special conversation on these topics and more, presented in partnership with Roche, on January 21 at 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET.
Learn on for the day’s information, and see you subsequent week.
Sy Mukherjee
sy.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
