The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

The CDC issued guidelines on December 3, 2020, proposing that the first doses should go to healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities; that was termed Phase 1a. Next in line would be essential workers, such as firefighters, police, corrections officers, food and agricultural workers, teachers and daycare workers, postal workers, and bus drivers. In that same category were people aged seventy-five and older. Phase 1c would include people over sixty-five and those with underlying health conditions. The FDA granted emergency use for the Pfizer vaccine on December 11. The first problem was the scarcity of the vaccine. The Trump administration had promised 300 million doses by the end of the year. The chief scientific officer of Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, reduced that to 35 to 40 million. That would be enough for up to 20 million people to receive the two shots recommended to achieve immunity. Some vaccine candidates were slow to emerge from trials; there were manufacturing problems; some of the raw materials were hard to obtain. In any case, by the end of the year, only about 2 million Americans had actually been vaccinated.