The race to find vaccines to protect people from COVID-19 is beginning to pay off.

Clinical trials of vaccines from Moderna and a partnership of Pfizer and BioNTech have now found their experimental vaccines to be highly effective.

The companies are expected to seek emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to allow their use during the pandemic.

If the agency gives the vaccines the OK, as seems likely, the next steps would include figuring out how to distribute the limited supply of the vaccines quickly and fairly.

Meanwhile, cases of COVID-19 and deaths from the illness continue to rise. How will the leading vaccines fit in to the public health response and what other vaccines are on the way?

Watch an expert panel discussion on the effort to develop and deploy safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 on Friday, Nov. 20, to be live-streamed here at 12 p.m. ET, as part of The Forum at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Scott Hensley, an editor on NPR's Science Desk, will moderate the discussion with:

Sarah Fortune, John LaPorte Given professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard Chan School

Barry Bloom, the Joan and Jack Jacobson research professor of public health and former dean of the Harvard Chan School

Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard Chan School, and

Rochelle Walensky, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital

This event is part of the Dr. Lawrence H. and Roberta Cohn Forum series.

You can email your questions to [email protected].

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.