That depends on your job, your age and your health. For the most up-to-date information, see The Washington Post’s vaccine distribution tracker.
A CDC advisory committee has said the first group to receive the vaccines should be health-care workers and residents of long-term care facilities. States, however, have the final say. Government officials have said they anticipate having enough doses of the two vaccines to inoculate 20 million people with their first shots by year’s end.
The next priority group for the vaccines should be essential workers — grocery store employees, teachers, emergency workers and others who are on the front lines of the nation’s labor force — and adults 75 years old and older, the CDC advisory panel said. Those groups could get shots beginning early next year.
A third group that should get priority includes other essential workers, adults 65 to 74 and people 16 to 64 with high-risk medical conditions, the committee advised.
Who exactly is an “essential worker” already is setting off debate around the country. Complicating the situation: There will not be enough vaccine to meet demand any time soon.
Healthy younger adults who don’t have medical conditions or high-risk jobs are likely to begin to get vaccinated starting in April, but not everyone will be able to get the shots immediately. And children aren’t even included in most coronavirus vaccine trials — Pfizer is the first company to expand its trial to people 12 and older — so they probably will be among the last to get access.
“I would say starting in April, May, June, July — as we get into the late spring and early summer — that people in the so-called general population, who do not have underlying conditions or other designations that would make them priority, could get” shots, said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
