Pentagon officials have previously said that service members are less likely to be adversely affected by COVID-19, Stars & Stripes reported. As of Wednesday, the military has reported 38,424 cases of COVID-19. Since March, around 600 service members have been hospitalized due to the virus, and seven have died.
“We have a young, healthy, fit, robust demographic in the United States military,” US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in March, Stars & Stripes reported.
According to the preliminary framework, military members will not be prioritized over civilians in any of the four phases of distribution for a vaccine.
The committee recommends that health care workers and first responders, especially those who have direct contact with COVID-19 patients, be the first to receive the vaccine. “Critical risk workers,” whose jobs are socially essential and who have a high chance of COVID-19 exposure, as well as teachers, people in homeless shelters and people in prisons, jails, detention centers or similar facilities should be next to receive the vaccine, according to the committee. After that, vaccines would be given to young adults, children and workers in industries essential to the functioning of society. Lastly, anyone not covered in the previous steps would be vaccinated.
“The discussion draft includes a summary of lessons learned from past allocation frameworks for mass vaccination campaigns, including for H1N1 influenza in 2009 and during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2013-2016, as well as from recent guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic for the allocation of scarce resources, such as medical resources and supplies,” the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said in a September 1 news release.
Under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, seven vaccine developers have received more than $11 billion in total funding from the US.
The three most promising vaccines to receive US government funding are being developed by Moderna; Pfizer and BioNTech; and AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, respectively. All three have started large-scale clinical trials that will involve a total of around 90,000 people.
