Day: September 23, 2021

It must have been after 8:00 PM last night that the FDA posted the COVID-19 Booster EUA authorization. The ACIP took that ball and ran with it all day long. Today was the second day of the ACIP meeting and the committee covered a lot of ground and ran over the schedule by more than an hour by the time voting on recommendations ended.

In a nutshell:

The committee voted unanimously to give boosters for people 65 and over as well as nursing home residents. Most of them voted to give boosters to those 50-64 with medical conditions that raise the risk for severe COVID-19 infection. A smaller majority voted to give boosters to those 18-49 with based on individual benefit and risk given underlying medical conditions. The committee voted down a proposal to give boosters to those 18-64 who would be at elevated risk of infection because of occupational or other setting, including health care workers, prison guards, and people who live or work in homeless shelters.

Nobody was happy about not giving an option to “mix and match” vaccines. If you got Pfizer in the initial series, you got Pfizer. But if you got Moderna or J&J—you couldn’t get Pfizer. More data is coming about heterologous vaccine dosing, but it’s not immediately available. On the other hand, the 6-month mark for getting the booster is anything but a hard line. You could wait months longer and still retain adequate vaccine effectiveness.

I thought it was interesting that, according to a survey in unpublished data, about a third of unvaccinated respondents said that offering a booster would make them even less willing to get vaccinated at all. See slides 52 and 53 in the presentation “Evidence to Recommendation Framework: Pfizer -BioNTech COVID-19 Booster Dose” by Dr. Sara Oliver. Despite that, several members of the committee stressed the critical importance of continuing to attempt vaccinating them.

There’s going to be a lot of flux in the next several weeks as more data is obtained. These recommendations are subject to updates and there will likely be several more meetings ahead, according to attendees.

I know that in Iowa, a lot of people are counting on the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) to give the word on when to roll out the boosters. The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics and Story County officials have said that. I have not seen boosters even mentioned on the IDPH website, though. I inquired about what their plans are for the booster rollout this morning on their website contact form. I expect it may be a while before I get a reply, if I get one at all. They’re incredibly busy.

I heard one expert say that in his community, they were offering the vaccine to people in a way that emphasized the individual’s benefit only. I think that’s certainly one way to “sell” it. Altruism has a place here, though. I get regular email messages from Hektoen International, hekint.org.

They almost always contain some essay or quote that’s thought-provoking and inspiring. Here’s one I got this morning that included a public domain photograph of Bertrand Russell as well as his thoughts on the receding ego:

Bertrand Russell on life from Hektoen International hekint.org

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

“How to Grow Old,” from Portraits from Memory and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell