Flu Season Will Be a Test Run for the U.S.’s Biggest-Ever Vaccine Campaign

Flu Season Will Be a Test Run for the U.S.’s Biggest-Ever Vaccine Campaign Mobile vans, vaccine strike teams and drive-throughs will take the place of traditional tactics to get shots to the public John Tozzi,Angelica LaVito Bloomberg.com

This fall, the U.S. will need to vaccinate huge numbers of Americans in the middle of a public-health crisis. It will also be a valuable dry run should a coronavirus shot arrive months later.

The annual U.S. flu vaccine campaign has been cast into disarray by Covid-19, with people staying away from pharmacies, schools, offices, hospitals and other places where they typically get their shots. But with fears of a flu surge colliding with the coronavirus pandemic, health authorities are looking at how one vaccine effort can inform the other. 

In Denver, public-health officials are trying to increase the number of adults who get the flu vaccine this year to 65% from 45%. To do it, they’re setting up “strike teams” that can go from school to school giving vaccines, vans that can stop at construction sites and inoculate workers, and doing outreach to hard-to-reach communities.

“This whole model that we’re building can then be moved into Covid,” said Judith Shlay a physician and associate director at Denver Public Health.

In Baltimore, the city has several vans it sends out to conduct Covid-19 testing, targeting high-risk residents. It will likely use those vehicles for flu vaccines and then Covid-19, City Health Commissioner Letitia Dzirasa said in an interview.

“Our flu vaccine distribution will inform a Covid vaccine distribution,” Dzirasa said.

The federal government has helped lead development of a vaccine, issuing more than $4 billion in contracts to drugmakers. The money is meant to speed production and cut financial risk for the most promising of the dozens of inoculations in development. President Donald Trump has said a shot could be ready by November, though other experts inside his government predict it will be well into 2021 before most Americans have access to one.

So far, federal health authorities have offered little detail about their plans for administering vaccines. The U.S. has said that it will likely rely on the private sector to distribute the shots, and last week extended a contract to health-care supplier McKesson Corp potentially worth more than $300 million. But the government has said almost nothing about who will get the shots first, where they’ll be given, and how to make sure they get to hard-to-reach and vulnerable communities. ...