Science Friday - Vaccination Logistics, Europe’s Green Deal. Dec 11, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

COVID-19 Vaccinations Begin In The U.K. This week, the U.K. began its vaccination effort against COVID-19 with Margaret Keenan, a 90-year-old woman from Coventry, becoming the first U.K. resident to receive the shot. She received a first dose of the vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech, and will require a second dose in several weeks to achieve the full effect. Nations around the world are racing to implement vaccination programs. The clinical use of the vaccine in the U.K. came just six days after the vaccine obtained emergency approval. This week, Canada also gave emergency approval to the Pfizer approach, and could start vaccinations next week. And the FDA is meeting this week to examine trial data and could soon approve treatments here. Sophie Bushwick of Scientific American joins guest host John Dankosky to talk about the vaccination effort and other stories from the week in science, including the return to Earth of asteroid material sampled by the Hayabusa2 mission, the finding that human-made stuff now outweighs all living things on Earth, and an advance in bionic eye development. What Has Europe’s Green New Deal Accomplished In Its First Year?  Just over a year ago, the Youth Climate Movement was at its peak. Millions of people were protesting government inaction in the face of rising global temperatures.  Nearly everything about the world has changed since then. And while the incoming Biden Administration has said it will adopt parts of the “Green New Deal,” the U.S. has failed to capitalize on the momentum of last year’s Global Climate Strikes. In Europe, however, the European Commission unveiled the “European Green New Deal in December of 2019. This 24-page document lays out a plan to make Europe climate neutral by 2050. Despite the pandemic, the commission has since made progress on many of its climate goals. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen took pains in her European “State of the Union” address this past September to spell out how the European economy could emerge stronger from the global pandemic, with help from the Green Deal.  On the one year anniversary of the announcement of the European Green Deal, guest host John Dankosky talks with Frederic Simon, energy and environmental editor for EUROACTIV and Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, as they reflect back on the progress the EU has made towards its ambitious climate goals. Charting A Path To Deliver The COVID-19 Vaccine Last week, the United Kingdom approved a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer through an emergency authorization, and vaccinations began this week. There is still not an approved vaccine in the United States, but according to Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine team, the goal is to produce and deliver 300 million doses by the end of January 2021.  Journalist Maryn McKenna and physician Uché Blackstock discuss how states and health departments are preparing to distribute the vaccine—and the hurdles they may face.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Later this hour, it's the one-year anniversary of Europe's historic climate proposal. We'll take stock of where things stand and what the U.S. can learn. But first, this week, the U.K. began its vaccination effort against COVID-19, and eyes in the U.S. were on the FDA, which is weighing emergency approval for several vaccines. Yesterday, an outside advisory panel recommended that the Pfizer vaccine received that emergency authorization. In a statement today, the FDA said it would rapidly work toward finalization and issuance of an emergency use authorization. Here to talk about that and other stories from the week in science is Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American.

Welcome back, Sophie. Thank you. So the first regular people, not part of an experimental trial, got COVID vaccines in the UK this week. How's that going so far? So far, it does seem to be going well, although there was a slight hiccup with, with people who have allergies. So there has been a couple allergic reactions to the vaccine in people who already have severe allergies. And so there's now a recommendation that people with severe allergies should maybe avoid the vaccine and rely on herd immunity.

But so far, the people who have had reactions have recovered. So it's unclear. I think we'll learn more as more people get vaccinated. That's to be expected. There will be some side effects as we start to see more people vaccinated. Absolutely. So Canada also approved that same vaccine from Pfizer. And yesterday, an FDA advisory committee voted to recommend its approval. So it seems, Sophie, like things are looking good here. Yes, I am cautiously optimistic. It does seem that this particular vaccine is going to be

approved in the United States as well. And hopefully other vaccines will follow because we're just going to need a really high volume of vaccine doses and of people getting vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity. With so much attention being paid to this Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine, I think people might forget that there are others out there as well getting developed. And we got some not so good vaccine news today from pharmaceutical companies, Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline. They announced a delay to their project after their vaccine did not appear to work well in older adults. That's probably some other news that we will be seeing over time. Some of these drugs maybe not working as well as other, Sophie.

Right. That's one of the reasons it's so important that we have as many options as we do, that there are a lot of different companies trying to develop these vaccines because some of them are not going to work. And it's best that we don't try to push a vaccine that's ineffective or that has really bad side effects. So the fact that there is such a race in this field to achieve a working vaccine is good because it gives us a wider range of options. And we'll be talking more about vaccine distribution in the U.S. and some of the challenges that we'll be facing coming up later this hour. Now, one of the big things right now, before everyone's been vaccinated, is following some of the restrictions. And you've got a story this week about who is and who isn't likely to comply and why. Maybe you can tell us about that.

So researchers surveyed about 60,000 people living in 30 countries to try to figure out what is underlying this refusal to follow public health guidelines, such as wearing a mask and keeping your distance from people. And they made up a few interesting conclusions. One was that as much as we've been tis-tisking this idea that young people are disregarding coronavirus rules, the fact is that this is not related to age. One big indicator is all of these countries, the majority of people thought that economic damage from lockdowns was something to worry about more than the risk of actually getting COVID. So that shows that one of the motivations for maybe going out and continuing life is that you have to work. and so that if you want to be able to combat that, you need to make sure that people are provided for economically. Another issue is something that we've seen throughout, which is that political polarization absolutely plays a role.

In the United States, people who identify as conservative are more likely to flout the rules and consider that they're not necessary. And part of that is due to political messaging from people on the conservative side of the spectrum. So political messaging is going to be really important. And just more informational messaging, that's one of the ways to improve. compliance? Yes, transparency is important because trust in the source of the information is going to play a big role in whether people are willing to go along with it. So for people who have had a higher trust in government, they were more likely to follow the government's rules about this. All right. Let's turn away from Earth for a second. This week, there was a homecoming for a space capsule

that was returning from an asteroid. So tell us about this. This is very exciting. The Hayibusatou mission returned a capsule this past weekend that contained samples of the asteroid Ryugu. And this is only the second time that we've had samples from an asteroid return. The first time was the first Hayibusa mission. And one of the cool things that researchers are hoping to figure out from these samples has to do with the origin of a type of tiny rock called a chondrule, which these chondules are found in meteorites and asteroids. and the question is, how did they form?

And the answer could tell us how the planets in our solar system formed as well. And this is something that people have been studying for quite some time. One of the interesting things in the story that you brought us is almost everybody who studies these things has a different idea about where they come from, what they mean. Yes, and some of the ideas for how they might have formed are very cool. Like one idea is that there may have been lightning that struck dust and, fused it into these conjurals. Another idea is that there were pressure waves in this cloud of cosmic dust that kind of pushed them together. And these are pretty small objects we're talking about. They range from maybe a couple millimeters wide to so small that you need a microscope to see them,

but they are so common in asteroids and meteorites, but not in planets. So by studying them, researchers can learn more about what was going on in the early solar system, because these objects date back about 4.5 billion years. I want to talk about your next story, which is really cool. It's about an improved bionic eye. I didn't know that bionic eyes were so well developed. Bionic eyes are still in their early stages, but this project is definitely a step forward, I would say. it was tested in two monkeys. And the concept behind a bionic eye is that you can put electrodes either on the surface of or it's slightly in the visual cortex of the brain and use them to stimulate the brain

and to make the person to whom that brain belongs see something. I say see in quote marks because you don't necessarily even actually have to have a camera to do this. You could be stimulating the electrode artificially. So do we know what sort of shapes people would actually be able to see? Again, these are monkeys where these tests are being done. But what exactly would this vision look like? So this particular study is a new one from researchers in the Netherlands. And it involved stimulating monkey's brains.

And actually, they could see letters. So the monkeys were trained to recognize letters. And then the electrodes in their brains were stimulated to create the shape of those letters. And they were able to recognize it. which is very cool. I'm showing my age here, but I think about the $6 million man and his bionic eye. So maybe we'll get there someday. There's a lot of bionic eye projects out there.

So I would maybe someday in the distant future. In the distant future. Now, we know that rest is important, but you've got a story about how rest might be important, even if your artificial intelligence. This is very interesting. Researchers are trying to develop artificial intelligences, these neural networks that actually mimic, they work similarly to the way that human brains work. So this isn't, we're not talking about all AIs here. We're talking about a specific type of AI. And researchers were studying it,

and they found that it started hallucinating almost. It started creating these random images, sort of like the way that a human being who is extremely sleep deprived might hallucinate and have an issue like this. But they could sort of reset the AI by playing a static noise through it sort of the way that deep sleep moves through the human brain. And when they did this, the AI recovered, so to speak, and functioned better again. So that makes so much sense from a human standpoint. Of course, we need a rest if we want to function well. What do we know about why this would help AI? When they talk about making the AI sleep, it's not like putting a computer to sleep. When you put your computer to sleep, it's just turned off or paused. When they make

this AI undergo a sort of artificial sleep, they're really stimulating it, but with random noise in a certain way. And so that actually tells us a little bit of something about AI that works like brains, but it also tells us about human brains, about some of the reasons that it's important to get a good night's sleep and to achieve this deep sleep where the brain is allowed to almost reset itself. Always a good tip, especially around the holidays. And speaking of the holidays. One last story here. It's always a time at which we collect a lot of stuff, stuff that comes out of the Christmas tree or whatever. There's news this week about just how much stuff we as a species have actually created, and it's a lot, Sophie. We have created so much stuff

that it now outweighs all life on Earth. So if you take all the living biomass, all the plants, all the insects, all the humans, all the other animals, and compare that. If you're not, if you take, all the living biomass, you weigh that against all the stuff that people have made, you know, your smartphones, your houses, your coffee mug, human stuff weighs in at about 1.1 trillion metric tons, and it's now surpassed the weight of life. So how did we measure this? So part of this is an approximation researchers estimating how many artificial objects are on Earth and then how much they would weigh and they compare it to how many living creatures are on earth and how much do they weigh. And one of the really interesting things is just the short time period in which this has changed.

So they estimate that in about 1900, the amount of artificial stuff was equivalent to about 3% of the world's biomass. And now today it's surpassed 100%. Because we just keep making stuff. They think that about every week, we create stuff that weighs as much as every human on earth. I have to admit, whenever I saw this story, the first thing I thought of was the beginning of the animated film Wally, where he's picking up all those little blocks of garbage and just stacking them higher and higher and higher. It feels like we're getting to that point.

We are creating a lot of trash in this way, right? because everything that is created that, you know, comes to the end of its useful life, then gets discarded. So, yes, I think that picturing this sort of like the opening to Wally is not inaccurate. And it just, it also gives us a sense of just how much humans are changing the planet, are affecting the planet, because we now are able to create enough stuff to outweigh life. Wow. Well, we have run out of time.

Thanks so much for chatting with me, Sophie. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Sophie Bushwick is technology editor at Scientific American in New York. When we come back, the Green New Deal has an EU counterpart, the European Green Deal. And it's on its way to being implemented. We'll find out what's in it and why so many countries support it coming up after this. Hey there, folks. It goes without saying this has been a challenging year, no. And if there's one thing we know for sure, it's that the need for fact-based journalism and the need for science

are stronger than ever. At a time when science is continually called into question, Science Friday remains committed to filtering out the noise and discussing the evidence supporting the science that you need to make informed decisions. You know that demand for Science Friday this year was higher than ever,

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John Dankoski, in all the chaos that was 2020, the pandemic and the U.S. presidential election largely pushed the issue of climate change from the headlines. It's hard to believe, but just over one year ago, the youth climate movement was at its peak, inspiring millions of people to protest government in action in the face of rising global temperatures. Of course, nearly everything about the world has changed since then. And while the Biden administration has said it will adopt parts of the Green New Deal, the U.S. has failed to capitalize on the momentum of last year's global climate strikes. In Europe, however, things have gone a bit differently.

One year ago today, the EU unveiled the European Green Deal, a 24-page document that lays out a plan to make Europe climate neutral by 2050. Joining me now to discuss that are my guests. Frederick Simon is Energy and Environmental Editor for Euroactive.com, based in Brussels. Ward is policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Hi there, John. Let's start with you, Frederick. And maybe we can start with this movement that we referenced happening more than a year ago. The youth climate movement, it inspired these global protests. It seems to have taken hold in Europe in a way that it didn't take hold quite here in the U.S. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the run-up to this Green Deal proposal that happened one year ago. It really changed everything quite surprisingly, in fact, those protests. To be honest, I didn't take them too seriously to begin with.

And then, well, they kept on going week after week. More and more young people started protesting. And the politicians noticed. And it happened, there was an important election taking place in April of 2019. And the timing was just perfect because all the politicians who were competing for the European elections, so these are the elections to the European Parliament in Brussels, had to speak about green issues in a way that they didn't have to do before. And the European Commission, when it came to power after the election, they felt that they were empowered that they had a mandate from the people to do something about climate change and about the environment more generally.

And that then became the European Green Deal. But Bob, do you see it the same way? Yes, absolutely. I think one thing that really strikes me is how much better the yarn. student strikers were at expressing their views and the politicians. I mean, it was a perfect contrast between the very blunt messages that were coming from people like Greta Thunberg and the kind of rather circuitous language that politicians typically used. And I think they transformed it and I think politicians in Europe were afraid of saying anything that might be perceived as

disagreeing with the student strikers. So Frederick, let's walk through the main points in the plan, and let's start with this idea of climate neutrality by 2050. Maybe you can walk us through what's proposed. So climate neutrality, we're talking about reaching net zero emissions by 2050. And we're talking about all greenhouse gases, not just CO2. So there's also methane, which is the second most important greenhouse gas. And it's net emissions, meaning it also takes account of carbon removals from forestry, from the ocean, and maybe one day from new technologies like common capture and storage.

So that is the objective. It's been agreed at a political level already a year ago by a unanimous decision from the European heads of states and governments, except one country, Poland, which accepted that goal for the entire union, but not for itself. It said, yes, we vote in favor of this, but we still need to look at whether they, makes sense for us as a country. But apart from Poland, everybody subscribed to that. And there's

a European climate law now. It's currently being discussed between the European Parliament and the EU member states. And now they have to decide on the fine print. And hopefully the agreement there can be reached relatively soon. Bob, what do you see as the important points that are being debated right now around this plan? Well, the European Council is, meeting on the 10th and 11th of December, exactly a year after the Green Deal was presented. And what they're discussing is not just this 2050 target for reaching net zero, but a much more ambitious interim target of a 55% reduction in emissions, annual emissions, by 2030 compared with 1990. So that really then makes this very clear that urgent action is needed.

And as Frederick said, you know, not all the countries are completely comfortable with this, particularly those countries which are very reliant on fossil fuels. Poland has a very big coal mining industry, very reliant on coal. They are, I think, worrying, which is why the Green Deal includes a very important so-called just transition mechanism, which is designed to help in particular those member states, those of the 27 member states, which are going to have the biggest difficulty and will need helping retraining and redeploying people like coal miners. So retraining people, what else does that include?

Because obviously, that's a huge economic shift. If your country has been mining and burning coal for its entire history and now it's being told it needs to completely transform itself, that's more than just a small transition, Bob. Well, that's completely right. But if you think about the economy in general, there are lots of industries that go out of business. And you can get huge political and social problems if you don't do anything to help people who are put our job. So Germany is leading the way in many respects in Europe on this, in that it is already making the shift away from coal. And one of the things it's doing is looking at those regions which have a lot of coal miners at the moment, they're going to build new car manufacturing plants and try and retrain coal miners to become people who work in the auto plant.

So that's big economic planning, but that's the kind of thing you're going to need to deal with these kinds of issues. Frederick, I want to get back to what's being debated around the quicker pace of this. Not all the policies that are in the European Green Deal are exactly new, but this does accelerate some of the action that has already been proposed in many countries. Yeah, it's a big mixed bag, let's say, of different policies that were already existing. except the level of ambition is much higher than it used to be. Like Bob said, the current target for 2030 is a 40% emissions reduction by 2030. Now we're talking about 55%. So we're really not talking about the same order of magnitude in terms of the level of ambition,

at least when it comes to climate change. And that is something that is really new and to me was really. surprising. It's even more surprising because even the conservative right subscribed to this. I mean, when you look at it, Ursula van der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, she's from the German Conservatives, CDU. And for many, many years, the CDU was against taking bold new steps in terms of climate ambition. And all of a sudden, following the European election, they changed tack entirely. I think they saw their potentially risk for them that they were going to be completely outflanked by the Green Party in Germany. There was a green wave and they realized they

needed to do something. And all of a sudden, something that seemed unthinkable before for them, meaning to raise this target by as much as 15 percentage points more than what they had, suddenly became possible. And that is remarkable. It's remarkable, Bob, and that's, I think, points out one of the biggest differences between Europe and the U.S. here. In the U.S., there are still politicians in Congress debating whether or not climate change exists. Yeah, I'm afraid the Republican Party in the United States have just lost the plot on climate change a long time ago. And I think they're going to have a real problem because the polling in the U.S. is the same as in other parts the world, young Republicans care about the environment, one action on climate change. If you don't

take it seriously as a politician, you're cutting off new generations of supporters. But the critical difference in Europe is they now understand, and this was explicit when the Green Deal with Interchus, that this is about an economic growth model. It's not just about saving the environment, it's about how to generate investment and jobs. So that is why it has been so firmly embraced across the board because there isn't another growth model, you know, available at the moment. Bob, how does this relate to the Paris Climate Agreement? Well, the Paris Climate Agreement, we're coming up to the fifth anniversary this weekend. And that has set a goal for the whole world to try and limit emissions so that the rise in global

temperature is well below two degrees, two Celsius degrees, and with best efforts to try and limited to one and a half degrees. And remember, global temperature is already one degree warmer than it was at pre-industrial time. In order to get close to that one and a half degree target, it means countries, particularly the rich countries, will have to try and get to net zero by about 2050. That's the significance of the European Union's target. It's consistent with that goal. It's also why Joe Biden is talking about that being the target for the United States. And there's also the target which the UK, which is now no longer a member of the European Union, has already put into its own domestic law. So that's the significance. And we've had a huge boost in the last

few months by the EU and other countries setting net zero targets, including China, which is declared in September that it will try and reach net zero by 2060. There's a lot that's in this deal that's not meant to specifically address climate change, though. We spoke with Richard Fuchs. He's a senior research fellow at the Carlsruh Institute of Technology. The green deer is actually much more than just setting a carbon emission goal. It consists actually of a wide variety of policy frameworks that feed into this. So for example, it's also setting targets for reduction in pesticide use and fertilizer use in determining how much of agricultural production should come from organic production, setting our forestation targets,

targets for nature conservation, rebuilding of natural watersheds and so on. So it's much more what the Green Deal is about. And I think it's sheer complexity and also a mound of these goals that they sometimes do not always go hand in hand with each other. In an article in the journal Nature, Fuchs argues that these aggressive goals may result in environmental damage being offshoreed to, other less prosperous regions? If you look how the European Green Deal is now formulated, it's a purely domestic policy framework.

It just tackles domestic targets. And if you want to achieve these domestic targets, let's say reducing fertilizer, this will come with the tradeoff that we probably have to outsource part of this food production to all the world regions. If we want to use less fertilizer, this will immediately affect the yields also in parts of Europe and also pesticide use and restoration of riverbeds and so on. I think our article was about this that we wanted to raise this awareness that we as a result probably have to outsource some of the local domestic production to other parts of the world, which probably produced not that environmentally friendly as we set the targets for ourselves.

that this is probably the way it will behave if we don't tackle these flaws. That's Richard Fuchs. He's Senior Research Fellow at the Carl Thruhe Institute of Technology. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking with Frederick Simon. He's an energy and environmental editor for Euroactive.com based in Brussels. And Bob Ward, he's policy director, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change in the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Frederick, I'm wondering first if you could comment on what we heard from Mr. Fuchs about this idea of offshoring. Europe setting these very aggressive goals, but maybe some of the environmental damage is going to be caused elsewhere. Yes, that's right. And this is what they call in jargon in Brussels carbon leakage, meaning the carbon emissions that we have in Europe, instead of being emitted here, they're being emitted elsewhere. The fact is at the moment there is no evidence that carbon leakage is happening at all. What is happening, though, is that looking forward, as the European Union adopts much more aggressive climate targets for 2030 and 2050, the risk of carbon leakage indeed could become much more real.

And this is why one of the things that was mentioned and announced as part of the Green, deal is this idea of introducing a carbon border adjustment mechanism. It's often being called a carbon border tax, but in fact it's, they call it an adjustment mechanism because it's linked to the European emissions trading scheme, the carbon market. And so that will be an essential, central element of the new climate legislation, I would say architecture is as Europe becomes much more aggressive in cutting emissions and needs to protect itself from carbon leakage and prevents green dumping. Bob, before we run out of time, I should ask, you know, we've already talked a little bit about the differences between the U.S. and the EU politically on these issues. One of the big

policy debates in the U.S. is whether or not to, quote, unquote, listen to the scientists, you know, people who actually study climate change. How much have scientists been involved in crafting this European Green Deal? Well, scientists have been involved in creating an environment in which policymakers are acting, and it's been a very clear communication from the scientists about what the limits are. The emissions targets that the EU is embedding through this climate law is absolutely based on the analysis that's been presented by the intergovernmental panel on climate change and other expert grid. So it's creating an environment and made very clear that these are the limits. And if you

want to be consistent with the goals, the international goals that have been signed up to in the Paris agreement, these are the emissions cuts you need. The US, I think, will be moving that way because I think, I would hope that the pandemic has shown what happens when you don't listen to the scientists. you end up with chaos and you end up with adverse outcomes for a lot of people. You need international cooperation to tackle the big global threats, infectious diseases and pandemics, loss of biodiversity and climate change. The main message is we all have to act together to tackle the threats because if any one country is not acting, we are all exposed to the risks.

Frederick Simon is Energy and Environmental Editor for your Proactive.com based in Brussels. Bob Ward is policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I want to thank you both for this primer on the European Green Deal. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. When we come back, vaccine distribution is getting set to start in the U.S. in just a couple of weeks. We'll find out how exactly it's going to work. That's coming up right after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. Last week, the United Kingdom approved a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer through an emergency

authorization. And vaccinations began this week. The first person to get the vaccine in the UK was a 90-year-old woman who is a retired shopkeeper. Here in the U.S., there's still not an approved vaccine. According to Operation Warp Speed, the federal government's COVID-19 vaccine unit, the goal is to produce and deliver 300 million doses by the end of January 2021. So how are states and health departments preparing for all this and how might we distribute the vaccine to the general public. My guests are here to talk about that today. Marin McKenna is a science writer and columnist at Wired. Marin, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me. And Dr. Uche Blackstock is a physician and founder of advancing health equity. She's also a Yahoo News medical contributor, and she's based in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome back to the show, Dr. Blackstock. Thank you so much for having me. So, Marin, let's get started here. once there is finally an approval of this Pfizer vaccine and this Moderna vaccine, each state will get an allotment. How exactly does this work? How many doses does each state get?

So this is turning out to be complicated. We know that there are going to be trenches of vaccine rolling out from the manufacturers. Not all of those doses are going to land at once. And for quite a while, the states have been confused about what they're going to get. And it's important to say that it's up to the states for the most part to distribute this because public health. is a function of the states. So back in November, Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort said to the states that they were going to assign those first trenches, divide them up and assign them to states

on the basis of population. And this, on the one hand, was an answer that the states had been waiting for for a while, but on the other hand, it caused a lot of alarm. Because if you do a cut just on the base of a certain percentage of population, not every state is going to have that same percentage of people who are highly at risk. There might be a ferocious outbreak in one state and not in another, though that seems

kind of unlikely because we have ferocious outbreaks everywhere right now. Or there might be more elderly people or more long-term care homes in one state than another. So that sense of just based on population has been causing some distress. So Dr. Blackstock, what are you hearing about vaccines and vaccine distribution right now? You know, I think we're hearing a lot of the confusion at both the state and local level. I currently work for an urgent care organization, and we've been told that we are definitely getting vaccines within a few weeks, but that details are to come. And I want to say that I think, given the work that I do around health equity, some of the issues in terms of vaccine distribution going specifically to hospitals, academic medical centers, and pharmacies, focusing more on sort of, the private sector as being distribution sites for the vaccination are of deep concern to me.

You know, there are many people who don't feel comfortable even walking into a hospital facility. And so, you know, I think that we're going to have to really work on a public health campaign, an expansive one that will address some of the concerns that the public has around the vaccine. So there's that distress. And maybe we'll get back to that because we need to talk about who exactly is going to be prioritized in each state. But, Marin, maybe you can walk us through just the real nitty gritty here. When you talk about a big load of vaccines going to the state, like, what happens? Does a pallet get dropped off at the state capital?

Like, how exactly are these being delivered to the various states? So I think the states are asking those questions and working through the answers now themselves. There are complexities to these vaccines. The two vaccines that we're going to get first are the one from Pfizer and the one from Moderna, Pfizer could be approved by the FDA's committee within days and Moderna next week, and the trucks could be rolling on those days. In fact, it's possible that some doses are pre-positioned at the academic medical centers that were vaccine testing sites.

At any rate, so vaccine gets delivered into a state. That Pfizer vaccine has to be held at a temperature that's referred to as ultra-cold, something like, I think, minus 80 degrees Celsius, which you can only do in the kind of freezer that you have, for instance, at an academic medical center or in the special packaging that Pfizer's had designed for them. But that Moderna's temperatures are a little less challenging, a little bit below the level of a home freezer, but still it has to be frozen and still with special packaging. The problem is that both of those vaccines come in what's called a minimum order, a certain minimum number of doses that have to arrive at a location. So then the states have to ask themselves,

when those doses get there, can they get enough people to match the number of doses they have, or do they have to figure out to what degree they can disaggregate those shipments and send them further out down the chain and keep them viable while they do that? And that's particularly going to be challenging. We spoke with Dr. Nero- Shah, who's the director of the main Center for Disease control and prevention about how the state of Maine is preparing and some of his concerns there. It is a massive, massive project to build out that infrastructure. In order for there to be mass vaccination, you have to have a massive force of vaccinators. So we've had to recruit a number of different health care providers to serve as vaccinators as we go into community vaccination. The first

phases of vaccine will be largely administered in the hospital setting. So hospitals themselves have had to tap their own staff to vaccinate their own staff. And then, of course, all of this has got to be tracked in a way so that we know where folks are getting vaccinated so we can remind them of when to come back for their second dose, so on and so forth. That all requires massive IT infrastructure. The IT infrastructure in many states is decades old. Thankfully, Maine is quite recent and modern. What I've told my staff is every day, I want to know how many people we vaccinated, and then the related and equally important question, the equity question, did we vaccinate the right people? So those are the two questions I want to know every day. How many people did we vaccinate

yesterday in Maine? And did we vaccinate the right people? If we don't have an IT system that can track who got vaccinated and what category they fell into, if we don't know the answers to either of those things, how do states know if they're doing a good job? The bottom line here is that states like Maine, we'll get the job done. That's what we do. It's what we do every single day. We tackle problems that are seemingly impossible and get it done. But additional assistance from the federal government would help me reach my goal of vaccinating with velocity and equity in Maine. That's Dr. Narev Shah, who's the director of the Maine Center for Disease Control, and prevention. And he said the bottom line to all this is funding. On a fiscal perspective,

we've received approximately $800,000 thus far and have been informed that there will be additional funding forthcoming, but even there, it's on the order of just a couple of extra $100,000. At the national level, my colleagues and I across the 50 states and 14 territories have come together, and we project that just as an initial down payment, we state and states and territories would require at least $8.4 billion just initially to get all of these systems set up. Additional resources are almost certainly going to be required so that across the country, vaccine can be delivered officially. The state and local health departments have been waiting for the stimulus funds that are held up

in Congress in order to literally get the money to hire IT professionals in order to build this infrastructure. That money has not yet arrived and they are running out of time. So, Marin, let's get back to these rollout phases. As we talk about phase one, health care workers, people on the front lines and nursing home residents by and large are set to get the first vaccines. Is that pretty much happening across the board in all the states? So that's the CDC's recommendation. Let's go over a couple of numbers because I think it's worth talking about the number of people that need to be vaccinated. So in the United States, so these are CDC numbers, there are 21 million healthcare workers, 53 million people over the age of 65 who presumably are at more risk, 3 million people living in long-term care centers. There's more

than 100 million people who have some kind of high risk or chronic medical condition that puts them at greater risk of infection and death. And there are essential workers, and we can talk about who those are, they add up to 87 million people. Now, we're only going to get 6.4 million doses in this first delivery in December. So how do you figure out among all of those people who seem at risk and in need, who gets it first? So in the meeting of the CDC's advisory committee on immunization practices, the ACIP, just a week ago, the decision was made that people should be ranked 1, 2, 3, 4, and then there are subdivisions within 1, 1A, 1B, 1C. And the ACIP affirmed that 1A should be health care workers and long-term care residents. But again, that's 24 million people

and that's many more people than there are doses arriving in this first month. So Dr. Blackstock, what do you think about these recommendations? Are we prioritizing the right people to get the vaccine first? Well, I will definitely say with that first group, the 1A group consisting of health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities that we definitely got that right. But, you know, the goals of the prioritization scheme are to protect those at highest risk from severe disease. so the people in these long-term care facilities, but also to reduce the spread of virus as well, and that's among health care workers.

And so I don't think anyone's going to argue that the 1A group isn't where most people do agree. I think the more complicated conversation is going to be around the 1B group, right? Essential workers, do we target essential workers who have essentially really faced the brunt of the pandemic because of the public-facing nature of their jobs? Or are we going to give it to the elderly? right, who because of their age are at risk of severe disease. And so I think those conversations at a state level are going to look different depending on the state and depending on the population in the state.

Just another concern that I had about the essential workers was I think that was the advisory committee on immunization practices way of incorporating race. We know that in black and Latinx workers are overrepresented among essential workers. And because of anti-discrimination laws, they could not. not explicitly put race into the guidelines. And so I do think that was one way they tried to use essential workers as a surrogate of race because we know black and Latinx communities have been disproportionately impacted in this pandemic. So, Marin, with 50 different plans, as you get through the 1A, the 1B, and into the general public, are you going to see a lot of variation

between how all the states are prioritizing who gets the vaccine? when. Absolutely. Now, some of that is due to the population of the state and what goes on in the state, right? You know, if your state includes a nuclear power plant, you might want to vaccinate those people so the new plant keeps running. If your state has a major deepwater port, you might consider port workers to be among the essential people as well as people who work in 7-Elevens and the cashiers in supermarkets and teachers and so forth. There are a lot of conversations. still going on about who those people are. But also, states have it within their purview to decide to deliver the vaccine in different ways. So one state might say, we have a county fairground where we

have a rodeo every fall. So let's just put everyone in their cars and have them drive through the county fairground and hang one arm out the window. But another state might say, no, really, we have a number of small towns and they have pharmacies and will empower the pharmacists to give the shot instead. And the last time we had a major vaccination campaign, not as big as this, was the 2009-2010 H1N1 flu. And there were situations in that campaign in which people living close to the borders of states could literally look over into the next state and say, those people are getting vaccine differently than I am. And they may be getting it before I am. And that caused a lot of confusion.

I'm John Dankoski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Marin McKenna, a science writer and columnist at Wired, and Dr. Uche Blackstock, a physician and founder of advancing health equity. Dr. Blackstock, maybe you can pick up on that because you have expressed concerns about using pharmacies or maybe some of the traditional medical facilities that people don't feel so comfortable going into. How would you design a system, whether or not it's driving through the rodeo fairgrounds or anything else that gets people where they actually are and where they want to get the vaccine?

Right. I think that it's going to be key for departments of public help to partner with community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, churches, community centers, schools. I think that what we wanted for testing should happen for the four vaccine distribution. We wanted it to be free, wanted it to be accessible. So I wish that people would be able to access vaccines at every street corner. There should be mobile vaccine distribution units driving throughout neighborhoods. And I know that because of the cold chain issues, that's going to be a problem, especially with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, less so with some of the other vaccines if they are approved. I did just want to also mention about the states. There are about 18 states that are

going to be using the CDC's structural vulnerability index. That is essentially a calculation based on census tracks to figure out which areas are most socially vulnerable. So ASIP did not include this in their guidelines, but the National Academy of Science Engineering and Medicine did include it in their framework for equitable allocation of the vaccine. And I think that is also a great way. It incorporates housing, vehicle access, poverty, not race explicitly, but minority status. And so I think there are some states that are going to do this distribution process a little

bit differently, but using the numbers that really matter in terms of determining which populations are more vulnerable. But that does raise a question, of course, as Marin said, you might be able to look across the border and see your neighbor doing something that in your mind might make a lot more sense than what's happening in your state. Yeah, I think we're going to see that a lot. Oh, because you live in New Jersey, things are a certain way. But in New York, we don't do it that way. Unfortunately, I think this rollout is going to be more challenging than we had hoped. It would be. Dr. Blackstock, what's another big barrier that you see here? I mean, are people going to be willing to take this vaccine? What sort of public information campaign do we need to make sure the people

are willing to get in line and do this? Right. I think just as, you know, we need funding for IT and for, you know, storage for the vaccines, we also need funding for a public health campaign, a rather expansive one that, again, engages trusted leaders in the community, but also is using social media and other sort of innovative ways to connect with different communities in a culturally responsive way because what's the sense in having a safe and effective vaccine if no one will take it? We already have the data that especially among black Americans, less than 50%, that they would be willing to take the vaccine a little more so among a Latino and white American. But I think vaccine acceptance is going to be another challenge that we'll have to address

over the next few months to year. We've run out of time here and there's so much more to talk about. We'll have to continue this conversation in the weeks to come. Marin McKen is a science writer and columnist at Wired. Dr. Uche Blackstock is a physician and founder of advancing health equity. She's also a Yahoo News medical contributor. She's based out of Brooklyn, New York. Thank you both for joining me today.

I really appreciate it. A pleasure to be here. Thank you, John. Charles Bergquist is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of our program,

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