President-elect Joe Biden’s plan to get 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the states during the first 100 days of the incoming administration is feasible -- and will have a significant effect in controlling the pandemic in the U.S., hardest hit of

COVID: What comes next - With Dr. Ashish Jha

The two vaccines available now, from Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech, require two does for maximin effectiveness. A rollout of 100 million more doses would protect 50 million more people.

“It's going to take work. It's not going to be straightforward, but I think it's very doable,” Jha said during the weekly taping of the “COVID: What Comes Next” podcast, available from the Providence Journal and the USA TODAY NETWORK.

But Jha, one of the world’s leading pandemic experts, said he remains concerned about coronavirus variants that have emerged. He listed the four that have been identified so far.

“There's what's called B117 or the U.K. variant,” Jha said. “There's the South Africa variant. There's a new variant identified in Brazil. And then maybe there's a fourth variant identified in Los Angeles. The question is: do they all matter, are they all necessarily much more contagious? There's no doubt at this point that the U.K. variant is really bad. It's much more contagious and it's here in the United States. We don't know about the South Africa and Brazil variants and whether they're here in the United States. And then there’s the L.A. one.”

That mutation, he said, has only recently been discovered.

“We don't know enough about it” yet, Jha said. “We don't know if it's more contagious. We don't know if it's more dangerous. I think we're going to know more in the next week or two. So the one I'm most worried about is the U.K. variant because I know about it. It's in the United States and it is clearly much more contagious.”

Jha assessed the meaning of recent nationwide data that shows new reported cases, new reported deaths and hospitalizations recently have declined, saying “it really feels like a nationwide kind of slowing of the infection and I have to say I'm really pleased. It should mean that we should see a little bit of a relief on hospitals, a little bit of a relief on deaths.”

But Jha raised a note of caution.

“It's not to understate how bad things still are,” he said. “There are still a lot of infections and we're still on track to have 3,000-plus deaths a day for the next month if not more. So none of this is easy, but it is maybe starting to get a little bit better.”

Vaccines from Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson may be available in a few weeks, with one under development by Novavax now in clinical trials.

Looking beyond this pandemic, Jha repeated his warning – shared by many other public-health and medical experts – that there will be another pandemic at some point, the questions being not if, but when and how dangerous. Science does not have the ability to predict what deadly viruses or microbes may reach the human population.

Nonetheless, what steps can be taken?

“We need to first and foremost invest in public health,” Jha said.

He compared such investments to money and resources given the military so that the armed forces are able to quickly respond to threats. “The reason we invest in our military is because when we need it, we need it to be effective,” he said.

“We also need to invest in science, in much more broad-based science,” Jha said. “We need technologies that we can turn towards, whatever the new viruses. Look, we got lucky a little bit with this coronavirus because we had a lot of experience with a previous coronavirus, the SARS virus from 2003. And so we actually knew a lot about how to make a vaccine against this virus.

“I'm not convinced we're going to be so lucky next time. We might get a virus that we've never encountered or know very little about.”

Answering an audience question from a woman who lives with limited scleroderma, a rare auto-immune disorder, and is eager to be vaccinated, Jha said “”what I would do is try to figure out a mechanism by which we give some clinical judgment to physicians and nurses because there are some people who are really going to be at high risk with these auto-immune diseases.”

This weekly podcast is hosted by G. Wayne Miller, health reporter for The Providence Journal.