GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — In the span of a week, two companies have announced that they’ve achieved extremely promising COVID-19 vaccines.
Moderna Pharmaceuticals have announced a vaccine they say is 94% effective, a week after Pfizer said theirs was 90% effective.
With numbers like that, Prevea CEO Dr. Ashok Rai says there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
“You get enough people to take a vaccine at 90 percent, then you get to that larger level of immunity much quicker in society and worldwide,” Rai told WTAQ’s ‘The Morning News with Matt and Earl’. “You start talking about eradicating the virus.”
That’s going to be a while out, though. It would still be months before a vaccine could be implemented.
“It’s going to take many months before we get to a population-level vaccine and start to phase back in to normal,” said Rai.
The vaccine would almost certainly be distributed in phases, first going to healthcare workers before being expanded to the elderly and at-risk populations before the population at large.
In the meantime, Rai says the situation is dire, with all of northeast Wisconsin falling into the newly-defined “critically high” category for COVID-19 activity according to state data. Masking and social distancing, he says, are still the best ways to mitigate the spread of the virus.
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