joining us is dr peter hotez the co-director of the center for vaccine development at texas children's hospital the dean of the national school of tropical medicine at baylor college of medicine dr hotez is an expert not just in vaccines but he's done work on a coronavirus vaccine long before covet 19 became a thing uh peter good to see you again you and i were together on the morning of july 30th sunday july 30th that uh sorry sunday december 13th i don't know how i got july 30th in my head but that that day will be
important because that was the day the vaccine started rolling out uh the following day monday december 14th uh people started getting the vac the vaccinations and it looked like a war-like effort uh getting it out there and getting these vaccines to these hospitals and to do healthcare workers what happened why why are we at such a low number you know allie i mean this has been a recurring theme uh for the whole year that are that we see time and time again that our public health infrastructure just cannot handle a lot of complexity we saw
this with the diagnostic testing that a year into this we still haven't gotten it uh right we we missed the entry of the virus coming in from europe um we now have this new problem we've just learned about that we're not even beginning to detect all of the variants coming in from the uk and south africa and probably right here in the united states and so this is another step um you know in fairness uh there is there are a lot of logistical complexities to this to the first vaccine the pfizer vaccine because of that
deep freeze requirement and that requires careful unpacking and a lot of monitoring to make certain there are no temperature incursions that will make the vaccine batch go bad and i understand that but then you have the problem that we never had a centralized plan for vaccinations left to the state so there's enormous variability uh right off the bat and then when you look at how we and this is just the beginning remember when you look at how we give adult vaccinations in this country uh so much of it is has been privatized and left to
the big pharmacy chains the supermarket chains that have pharmacies i mean our our health system for vaccine for vaccinating adults is predominantly cvs walgreens something called amazon pharmacy and uh uh and the big supermarkets so this is going to be and then you throw on top of that some very complicated guidelines issued by the advisory committee on immunization practices it's going to be very tough to implement that and then on top of that you're going to have the issue of we still don't know the durability of protection people are going to have to be advised
when to get a third dose of the vaccine potentially later in the year uh potential safety issues what if you know you have a severe allergic reaction how do you manage that in a pharmacy-like setting so this is going to be incredibly complicated and uh and i think the the country is getting a bit wary of it because you know we keep on tuning in to hear general leslie groves and robert oppenheimer uh and we expect to hear about how we're going to win the war on fascism instead we're hearing about supply chain management issues
from between hanford and and los alamos and oak ridge and that's not what the american people want to hear at this point durability right now we're the cdc is talking about three months but that's just because that's what they've been able to to determine from from testing it could be longer than that that that's right this is a brand new technology we we just don't know and and it may not be the same for the pfizer vaccine and the moderna vaccine and the next wave of vaccines is going to be the two adenovirus vaccines from
astrazeneca oxford and uh and and j j we don't know the durability of that either so there's going to have to be a lot of conversations with the american people and a lot of monitoring to follow this the hope is that it is fairly long lasting and it might last for a period of years but you know we don't know is it three months three years or 30 years we're just going to have to wait and see
