Investment bank Goldman Sachs has forecast that more than 70% of people in developed markets will be vaccinated against the coronavirus by fall 2021.
In a note published last week, Goldman Economists Daan Struyven and Sid Bhushan laid out a vaccine timeline using a combination of supply estimates (using data from leading vaccine developers Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax, and Johnson & Johnson) and demand, using consumer survey data.
They said they expected the first doses of coronavirus vaccines to go to the most high-risk groups of people in the U.S. from mid-December onwards.
Vaccine approval and rollout would lead to “significant public health benefits” from the first quarter of next year, the economists added, with half of the population of the U.S. and Canada likely to be vaccinated in April.
Goldman expects the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines in the coming weeks, with an FDA advisory committee meeting on Dec. 10 and possibly Dec. 17.
Moderna said Monday that it will ask the FDA for emergency approval later that day after new data confirmed that its vaccine was more than 94.1% effective in preventing the coronavirus and was safe.
Meanwhile, in the U.K., Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday that he hoped both the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccine would be approved “in the course of the next few days and weeks.”
In the U.S., Operation Warp Speed advisor Dr. Moncef Slaoui told CNBC earlier this month that the government was ready to start immunizing people within 24 hours of the FDA granting emergency approvals for the vaccines. He also said that the U.S. will have 35 to 40 million doses of a vaccine to distribute in December.
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