I mean, me, and other people having their own opinion based on the very shady information the are thrown to us on media, its ok. But there are a lot of people that are supposedly professionals that must take the correct decisions that looks like they are even worst informed than us.
The problem for the professionals has not been that "they are even worst informed than us" it is that they've been inundated with not just companies lobbying but entire nations pushing that they have the best thing going, data coming at them from all sides which is filled with "spin" on test results, the overwhelming logistics being worked on, etc. The press just has to research and write about what they see, while the professionals have to actually make CORRECT decisions.
I don't think it is fake news this time Terry. However it is a big "IF". I am of the belief that this vaccine has been ready for months. The approvals and distribution has been held up by powerful judges and politicians backed by the antivac crowd.
Ummm - No. There've been experimental vaccines developed for a couple/few months, because the basic "how to" is not that hard. HOWEVER . . . They were untested outside of Russian prisons (get years off a sentence for participating), Chinese military (no choice and for "good of the people"), and at least one African country. Definitely NOT ready for prime time. On top of that, even those hadn't had the problems figured out on how to scale up to tens of millions of doses, because as my daughter likes to say "the recipe changes."
Scaling up is also the current barrier for the next few months. The reason Pfizer, AZ, and Moderna are all hitting the news at the same time is that the development process has been so similar for everybody. There are some other companies waiting for initial test results to announce their versions too, but these three biggies had the money to create and then do basic tests on more variants.
Even though Pfizer took this all on without the Govt strings or involvement this is where I personally think we need to give credit to the outgoing administration (rare for me) for putting together Operation Warpspeed and credit to Congress (also rare for me) for coming together to fund it. My daughter related that they started with well over 1,000 variations to get just the few which were deemed good enough to test, then just initial testing knocked out most of those. Each single variant takes hundreds of thousands of dollars just to begin the process. If you really want to see what a horse race this has been and how to know these have not been available for a while like you think, look at the stock prices on the smaller companies. Investors were bidding them up and now that the winners are becoming clear, a lot of those other company stock values are falling.
The logistics are still a nightmare because the goal is roughly 70+% of the population should be inoculated twice and I continue to hear that the doses are different for the different visits. That takes massive distribution and one heck of a big database, which will drive those worried about securing their personal info nuts. Trying to keep the development going PLUS take on these logistics is why the incoming administration has been till recently trying SO hard to get access to the basic data and plans. If maybe somehow possibly Trump was able to overturn the election, being open with this would have done no harm, and presuming that Biden is sworn in then to not have the information would have hurt the country by delaying the end of COVID19. Fortunately, it sounds like this is now being resolved.
The big news to me is that the Astra Zeneca vaccine doesn't need to be kept as cold, which massively eases the distribution logistics.