Litjen Tan, Immunization Action Coalition Chief Strategy Officer joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how a COVID-19 vaccine can prevent cases from surging.

Video Transcript

- Let's turn now to the continuing process of vaccination here in the United States. Of course, the first doses of the Pfizer, BioNTech vaccine were given this week. And now, we are awaiting a potential approval of the Moderna vaccine. There's an advisory committee to the FDA that's due to give its decision later today.

We could have the emergency use authorization awarded as soon as tomorrow potentially. We're joined now by Litjen Tan, Immunization Action Coalition Chief Strategy Officer. Litjen, thank you so much for being here. Obviously, a lot of challenges with this deployment of the vaccines, both logistically but also sort of sociologically and psychologically.

And I know this is something that your group has focused on. How do you reassure the populace, particularly when it's such new vaccines, that they are indeed safe? What does that campaign look like?

LITJEN TAN: Thank you very much again for the opportunity to come and speak on this very important issue. I think-- I mean, the biggest picture for all of us in the immunization arena, as well as public health, is obviously getting out of this pandemic. And getting out of this pandemic means we need we need to have herd immunity, which is going to be brought to us by the vaccine.

So if we build a vaccine and nobody comes, that's a problem. So I think what the CDC has done, what my group has done, and a lot of public health advocates have done is work on this in twofold. The first thing-- and actually, the logistics of getting out the vaccine to the health care workers actually is probably the easier part of this process-- is working with the health care workers to help them understand.

And they're the ones that can understand the rigorous evidence that was looked at independently by the FDA and by the CDC advisory committee on immunization practices. And help them understand that that evidence was independently reviewed by independent experts to assure both safety as well as the efficacy of this vaccine so that the health care providers themselves are now comfortable receiving it because they are obviously in that first tier of recommended folks.

Once they receive the vaccine and they're assured of the vaccine, their recommendation to their patients and to the public to get vaccinated will be the biggest and probably the most important reason why someone gets vaccinated. We know this from the past that reluctant adults who are not interested in getting something like let's say the flu vaccine or the pneumococcal vaccine, after a great conversation with their provider, they end up getting vaccinated.

So I think that's something we want to work on first with the health care provider. But with that being said, the CDC is also launching a national campaign and the Ad Council is also going to be launching one in a few months that is targeted at the nation itself to help them also understand that this process of approving and authorizing these two vaccines are also evidence based, science based, resulting in a safe and effective vaccine that the public should feel comfortable taking.

And I think we've been doing a lot of work on that over the last couple of months, and your statistics here would suggest this as well. And we've been seeing this incremental increase in not just public opinion with regards to whether they would get the vaccine, but also in health care providers as well. Health care providers have incrementally begun to come back and say yes. We would be we would get this vaccine as soon as it becomes available.

So I think it's working but again, as with any shift in public opinion, we've got to keep working and keep being transparent with the evidence, transparent with our knowledge, and transparent with our expertise.

- Litjen, you're kind of outlining the challenge of ensuring the process to get here was safe. But I'm curious about how you talk through the concerns people have with respect to side effects, especially when you're vaccinating tens of millions of people. Hopefully, tens of millions of people a week at some point in the not too distant future.

The math says there will be thousands of people with quite adverse reactions. But ultimately, the math says that you on average are overwhelmingly likely to have a couple of headaches and then be fine.

LITJEN TAN: Yes, absolutely. So I think this is part of that evidence. And I think one of the things we're looking at and telling people is this idea that side effects is a bad terminology because it implies that there's something bad going on. And actually, a lot of the reactogenicity, which is what we like to use, to first for the Pfizer vaccine and then you'll see obviously from the FDA package with the Moderna vaccine, a lot of those systemic reactogenicity, like you said, the headache for a day or two, the fever for a day or two.

Those reactions are actually indicative of the immune response reacting to the vaccine. That's what we want. I think it's interesting if you look at the placebo and you see the lower reactogenicity, it's because they receive saline. The immune response is not reacting too much and I think that's something we need to help people understand.

It's a good sign that your body is getting the local soreness because that means something's going on and the immune response is reacting. And the fact that you're getting this systemic fever for a couple of days, low grade fever, that means the immune system is doing its job. So that's the first thing I think we need to help people understand.

And the side effects are something we need to be very transparent with. This vaccine is reactive. We know that. And so if we want people to come back for their second dose after receiving the first dose, we have to be very clear about that. Because sometimes, you say oh man. I got that first dose and it hurts. I'm not going to go get that second dose.

And we do not want that happening, so we got to be very transparent. And the second thing we've got to help people understand is that over the course of vaccinating millions and millions of people, we have the best vaccine safety surveillance system in the world here in the United States, and that this system will be looking at these millions of people getting vaccinated as we go forward in time. And these systems will pick up signal.

That's what we want them to do. Then, the systems have to then do the job of making sure that the signals that we pick up are actually causally related to the vaccination process itself. And I think that's the job of the safety system. We've done this in the past with other vaccines. And I think we need to then be very transparent with that data, maybe monthly reporting out to the public to say, hey look.

This is what we're seeing now. This is what we're looking at. These may be causally associated. These definitely are not. I think that's the kind of messaging we're going to have to have to continue this vaccination program into 2021, into the summer, and into the fall of next year so that we can get out of this pandemic.

- Litjen, really interesting information and helpful information for people. Thank you for being here. Litjen Tan is Immunization Action Coalition Chief Strategy Officer. Appreciate your time.

LITJEN TAN: Thank you very much.

- Well, when we come back--