These People Could Get First Coronavirus Vaccine In Massachusetts

ROSLINDALE, MA — Gov. Charlie Baker on Thursday laid out his rough draft of who should get a coronavirus vaccine first if and when one becomes available in Massachusetts.

Baker said the deployment of a vaccine would "focus on particular high-risk individuals to begin with, which would mean, in Massachusetts, health care workers, long-term care workers, people in communities of color that have been particularly hard hit by the virus."

There still could be a long way to go before those decisions need to be made. But when a vaccine is ready for everyone, Baker thinks it will go through the usual channels of distribution — something experts have said gives the state a leg up when it comes to getting a coronavirus vaccine to people.

"It is my assumption that whatever were to happen with a COVID vaccine would probably run through a fairly traditional distribution model because it is already there," Baker said outside a Roslindale CVS, where he got a flu shot and urged residents to get their own ahead of a potential second surge of COVID-19.

Moderna said Friday it expects 20 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020. Each person is expected to require two doses of the vaccine. The Cambridge-based company is looking at between 500 million to 1 billion doses in 2021.

President Donald Trump this week said a vaccine could be ready as soon as next month and widely distributed soon after, something that contradicted what the the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier in the day.

Dr. Robert Redfield said even if a vaccine is ready by the end of this year, there wouldn't be much of it, while a vaccination shot wouldn't be widely available until at least spring or summer.

Many health experts have been tempering expectations on what a vaccine might mean for everyday life.

"I don’t think we’re going back to normal any time soon, vaccine or no vaccine," Shira Doron, hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, told Commonwealth Magazine. "It’s not going to be like everyone gets vaccinated on Monday, nobody has to wear masks Tuesday."

There have been more than 126,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in Massachusetts. More than 9,000 residents have died from the virus.