As I write this in mid-January, the COVID-19 vaccine rollout has been underway for just over one month. By all accounts, vaccination is going much slower than anticipated. The Trump administration had vowed to have at least 20 million Americans vaccinated by the end of 2020. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only approximately 11 million people have received a COVID-19 vaccine dose to date. President Biden has promised to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office. It is yet to be seen whether his administration will be any more successful than his predecessor’s. The blame game and finger pointing has begun – the federal government blaming the states for not being better prepared and the states claiming insufficient federal funding and lower than promised vaccine availability.
Watching this unfold makes me draw parallels with what we might face in the swine industry if we were to implement a large-scale vaccination program for foot-and-mouth disease or classical swine fever. Although on a somewhat smaller scale (roughly 60 million pigs managed by approximately 63,000 farmers) and pigs rather than people, we would face many of the same challenges faced in the COVID-19 vaccination effort. We would likely face limited vaccine supply (especially early in the outbreak), distribution challenges, prioritization questions, the need to give multiple vaccines, regulatory issues regarding record keeping, and deciding who can administer the vaccine given potential personnel shortages. As with the COVID-19 effort, the end-user will be subject to decisions made at the state and federal level and subject to the resources available.
Given the challenges of administering a vaccine to protect human beings in a pandemic with comparatively unlimited access to resources, imagine the challenges the swine industry is likely to face. Agriculture officials at the state and federal levels need to be watching carefully as this COVID-19 vaccine response continues and work with swine producers and veterinarians to determine how similar challenges can be addressed to better prepare and protect the swine industry. In addition, the need to ensure adequate vaccination will most likely be an international effort involving all North America.
Obviously, the swine industry has some advantages with regards to vaccination. Vaccine administration could be accomplished by producers assuming government officials allow that to occur under veterinary oversight. Likewise, our well-established network of distribution could facilitate vaccine shipments. Again, this assumes government officials are willing to take advantage of that existing resource.
We have also seen the challenges public health has faced with COVID-19 diagnostics and surveillance. In the swine industry, we face these same issues. Who to sample, how many to sample, what samples to take, what tests to run, who can move, where can they go, and under what circumstances, to name a few. Addressing these questions in the face of an ongoing outbreak is highly inefficient and slows the entire response effort thus further jeopardizing business continuity across the swine industry. In some ways, the delays we have seen in the COVID-19 response are understandable, SARS-CoV-2 was an entirely new virus. In fact, I think one of the bright spots in this pandemic is the speed with which public health was able to develop, approve, and implement diagnostics and vaccines. Classical swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, and African swine fever do not get that same pass. These are known viruses that have been very well researched.
Limitations to an effective foreign animal disease response are well documented and have served as the basis for decades of debate and collaboration. Not having answers to the simple questions previously mentioned is inexcusable. We should already have an effective, agreed upon, and exercised strategy in place for the detection and response to the introduction of a foreign animal disease. The fact that we continue to debate many of the same gaps in response is disheartening and frustrating.
Interestingly, it took a human pandemic impacting the ability to market our pigs for industry and government officials to begin to identify and develop the resources necessary to facilitate a large-scale disease response. An example is depopulation and carcass disposal. These have been identified as gaps in our response capabilities for decades but only just now have we begun to take steps to ensure access to the resources necessary to ensure the industry can accomplish those critical tasks. However, there are still not sufficient resources available nationally to address these issues. In addition, basic questions remain unanswered involving surveillance, animal movements, testing, and vaccination strategies.
The COVID-19 pandemic remains a tragic episode for global public health. The vaccination rollout failures expose the challenges associated with poor federal leadership and variable state response capabilities. We have the time now to shore up those issues through collaboration among state and federal officials and the swine industry. Those of us responsible for responding to a similar outbreak in animal health are hopefully watching this COVID-19 response and learning from the obvious parallels so we do not make the same mistakes.
Harry Snelson, DVM
Executive Director