Philadelphia Medicine Fall 2020 - 7

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Health care providers "will play a critical
role in helping develop confidence in
COVID-19 vaccination."
- Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and
Respiratory Diseases, or NCIRD, for the CDC.

Safe and effective
Messonnier said that despite all
the uncertainty, "we are going to
be relying on the systems that we always rely on to ensure that the
vaccines that are being recommended are safe and effective, and that
oversight on those vaccines is vigorous and also transparent. We hope
that by talking this through, we will build your confidence, not only
in these vaccines, but in the systems that are in place.
"Your confidence is crucial, I understand, if you're going to be
able to talk confidently to your patients about these vaccines."
But there is a wide spectrum of vaccine-hesitant individuals,
according to Dr. Amanda Cohn, acting chief medical officer at
NCIRD and executive secretary for the Advisory Committee on
Immunization Practices, or ACIP, for CDC.
The ACIP advises the CDC director and, upon CDC approval,
they become CDC recommendations, Cohn said.
The ACIP is made up of 15 voting members: one consumer
representative and 14 disciplines in various health care industries
and organizations.
Some individuals, Cohn said, will accept the vaccine, while
others will delay getting immunization until more is understood.
Some will refuse the shots altogether.
"And that's the group of people whom we really need to increase
confidence in to increase the number of those individuals who accept
and don't delay vaccination."
The strategies necessary to allow people to accept COVID-19
immunization need to be unique and robust, especially among the
vaccine "influencers," Cohn said.
"We have to contain vaccine misinformation," Cohn said. "There
are both valid concerns about COVID-19 vaccines that we need to
address with empathy. But there also
is vaccine misinformation, and this
has raised more questions from individuals about the safety of COVID

vaccines. So these false claims about vaccines have to be effectively
countered with accurate information."
Cohn said an older generation is more influenced by established
news organizations and the advice of their personal doctor. The
younger generations are influenced mostly by social media and a
few strong people of influence, including leaders who speak to them.
"We have to shift that timeline and with that, increase trust earlier,"
Cohn said. "Because the only way we will have any impact on this
pandemic is if people get vaccinated over a shorter period of time."

Operation Warp Speed
Bringing out the vaccine has involved more than 200 companies
and organizations throughout the world.
They're all working collectively, or in some small way, with a
program called Operation Warp Speed, or OWS.
What is OWS?
According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services,
or HSS, OWS's goal is to produce and deliver 300 million doses of
safe and effective vaccines with the initial doses available by January
2021, as part of a broader strategy to accelerate the development,
manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics
and diagnostics.
According to the HHS website, OWS is a partnership among
components of the HHS, including the CDC, the National Institutes
of Health (NIH), the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the Department of Defense (DoD).
OWS engages with private firms and other federal agencies, including
the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, and the
Department of Veterans Affairs. It will coordinate existing HHS-wide
efforts, including the NIH's Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic
Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) partnership, NIH's Rapid
Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative and work by BARDA.
To accelerate development while maintaining standards for
safety and efficacy, OWS has been selecting the most promising
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'Health care providers are the lynchpin,
critically, in the successful COVID-19
vaccination program.'

- Dr. Amanda Cohn, acting chief medical officer at NCIRD and executive secretary
for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, for CDC

Fall 2020 : Philadelphia Medicine

Philadelphia Medicine Fall 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Philadelphia Medicine Fall 2020