What will arrival of COVID-19 vaccine mean? – Oklahoman.com

The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, plans to test the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates on tens of thousands of people to determine efficacy and safety. NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told AP, Definitely the worst thing that could happen is if we rush through a vaccine that turns out to have significant side effects.

Another factor that may contribute to this middling response to a vaccine is that several generations of Americans have grown up without potentially fatal diseases, because vaccines wiped them out. Columnist Clarence Page touched on this recently. He recalled lining up in grade school to get a polio shot not long after its approval in 1955.

Polio haunted our lives then, Page wrote. When I was in kindergarten in 1952, more than 57,000 children were stricken with the disease and thousands died in one of the worst polio epidemics in American history.

Everybody knew somebody who had to wear heavy leg braces or use an iron lung machine just to breathe because of the paralyzing disease.

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Health experts say that if our society is to return to what it was pre-coronavirus, a COVID-19 vaccine is a must. So too will be persuading many Americans to roll up their sleeves.

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What will arrival of COVID-19 vaccine mean? - Oklahoman.com