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The Covid-19 shot that Rall had in late July – his third – was much easier to get hold of and much more convenient, he says, even though the United States Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control of United States and Prevention currently does not recommend recalls of the Covid-19 vaccine to anyone.
Rall, 57, simply walked into a CVS pharmacy in Manhattan, without an appointment, and told the pharmacist he wanted to get the Covid-19 shot. He claimed it was his first dose.
Rall, a cartoonist and political writer, says he has asthma and a history of serious respiratory illnesses, including swine flu and pneumonia. He suspects he had Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic, although his antibody tests were negative. He is not interested in taking risks now that the more transmissible Delta variant is ravaging the country and more than 98% of the American population live in counties considered to have “high” or “substantial” transmission of Covid -19, according to the CDC.
“I want to stay protected, you know, and I think it’s also pretty obvious that this is going to be the norm, and it could be like in a month or two,” Rall told CNN. “Everyone’s going to do it, so why wait until it’s hard to get dates again?”
Vaccine advisers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet on Friday to discuss boosters and additional doses for people with compromised immunity.
And the FDA is already considering full approval of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, a move some say could come in a matter of weeks. All Covid-19 vaccines are currently available in the United States under emergency use authorization. Full approval could mean that fully vaccinated people could be given an additional vaccine – well before any recommendation for boosters – if a doctor thinks it’s warranted.
The vaccines available provide strong protection for most people, but studies have shown that uncompromised people do not accumulate sufficient protection against standard doses of Covid-19 vaccines. Recent research also suggests that some protection from mRNA vaccines wanes for everyone over time.
He said that an FDA approval “opens everything up for people who want a doctor’s prescription. It only adds to the chaos.
“We are not there yet” on the boosters
Rall’s own decision to seek a booster was prompted by all the research he read, including data from the Israeli Ministry of Health released last month that suggests the overall effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against all infections. to Covid-19 fell to just 39% among those who were vaccinated earlier in the year, although their data shows the vaccine is still 91.4% effective in preventing serious illness.
Other data published by both Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna suggests that both vaccines see antibody levels decline over time.
But that doesn’t mean protection ends, and boosters aren’t recommended for anyone yet.
Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday that there is still limited data on how long vaccines can last.
“At the end of the day, we are monitoring the durability of the protection very carefully,” said Fauci. “And when you follow it, you watch and see what percentage of protection you get as you go month by month.”
When data shows protection drops below a certain threshold, he said, health officials will recommend boosters for the general population.
Dr Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Pennsylvania Children’s Hospital, said Tuesday in a conversation moderated by Brown University that he thought “we’ll cross the line, where we know we need. a booster dose, when vaccinated people, fully vaccinated, are nevertheless hospitalized or in intensive care or dying.
“We’re not there yet.”
So far, vaccines are working: CNN analysis of CDC data suggests more than 99.9% of fully vaccinated people have not had a serious infection.
It’s also unclear what risks might come with one more shot. Topol says it’s best to sit a few more weeks, and he cautions that people who just want to go out for a booster should consider the potential side effects.
“We don’t know that the boosters are going to protect. These boosters are directed against the original strain, the same problem we have with a vaccine,” Topol explains. “They’re going to increase the neutralizing antibodies in people over the weeks and they’ll help to some extent, but we don’t know how much because they’re not directed at Delta.”
“If you told me that this vaccine would kill me in 10 years, I would go and take it right away because it’s this or this horrible Delta variant that is circulating, and I don’t think I would survive it”, a- he declared.
And it wasn’t difficult for him to get a recall – Rall says the pharmacy didn’t ask him a single question, and didn’t check his immunization records.
When asked how CVS determines if someone who goes to one of the pharmacies or MinuteClinics to be vaccinated against Covid-19 has not already been vaccinated, a company spokesperson said that “patients who have been fully vaccinated at a CVS pharmacy, or who notify us that they have been fully vaccinated by another provider, will not receive another vaccine under current CDC guidelines.” In some cases, pharmacists may also be able to verify a patient’s immunization status with a state’s vaccine registry. “
CVS could not have understood that Rall had already been fully vaccinated in New Jersey as the vaccination records are state-run and he received his third injection in New York.
Rebecca Coyle, executive director of the American Immunization Registry Association, said states are currently behind with larger-than-normal amounts of immunization information – and it’s up to states to strike deals to share the data vaccination with each other.
“I don’t want to point out a loophole, but we don’t have a good exchange of data between states at this point,” she said.
Stimulus plans underway
While some people seek boosters, some places plan to boost vaccines for certain people.
The city of San Francisco welcomes people who have received the single injection vaccine against the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus and wish to receive an additional dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. Officials with the city’s public health department said last week that the department was making an “accommodation” for those who had seen a doctor, and that it was not recommending additional doses or a change in policy.
In an email to CNN, Dr Peter Hotez, dean of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said he believes the United States will move to the third mRNA and possibly the second J&J fairly quickly for them. people receiving immunosuppressive therapy, especially solid organ transplant recipients, and the next question will be what other immunosuppressed conditions will also be included. After that, the next question will be whether the United States wants to add boosters for people over 60 – as Israel has just announced its intention to do.
Germany, the UK and France have also announced booster programs for their most vulnerable populations, although the World Health Organization last week called for a moratorium on booster injections until at least September until vaccines can be distributed more equitably around the world.
This is a great irony for Rall, who says he wouldn’t have considered looking for a third shot if it wasn’t clear that a lot of things are not being used by populations hesitant to vaccinate, especially in South.
“But even locally here in New York when I spoke to local doctors and pharmacists, they all have a lot of unused vaccines, and I thought, well, that’s ridiculous.”
Rall says that since sharing his experience with others, he has heard doctors say they quietly used doses of the vaccine as reminders that had to expire for themselves and their family members, and they’ve been doing it for months. “There’s a dungeon out there, there are a lot of doctors who have access to these doses, and they use them rather than throw them away.”
Those close to Rall weren’t too surprised by his decision to get the shot. “Friends somehow know I’m an independent thinker, I don’t really care or have a lot of respect for ‘official findings’ coming from policy makers because. I know policy makers are trying to save as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible. It’s their job. “
“I care about myself first, so I have a different calculation.”
Virginia Langmaid, Jen Christensen, Jacqueline Howard, Hannah Ritchie and Niamh Kennedy contributed to this report
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