Awaiting this “approval effect” – Boston 25 News

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ASHLAND – Until Tuesday, Elaine Owusu-Ansh was one of the hesitant to vaccinate.

“I’ve been going back and forth about this for a while,” she said. “Just the whole trust issue with him because he was created so quickly.”

Elaine explained that she is by nature a very thorough person. And so the speed with which COVID-19 vaccines hit the market didn’t suit him. But, having committed to taking classes at Mass Bay Community College in September, Elaine knew she needed to be vaccinated and so made an appointment to do so at a clinic co-sponsored by Ashland and MBCC.

However, she approached the task with much less trepidation knowing that the FDA fully approved the very vaccine she had chosen for her injections – Pfizer BioNTech – just the day before.

“The fact that the FDA approves it kind of gave me an extra boost,” Elaine said. “Still a little anxious, but I came and did it.”

Public health officials are hopeful that millions more Americans will now come “come and do it”, given that the FDA has officially given the green light to one of the vaccines. The FDA is also expected to review longer-term safety and efficacy data on the other two COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. But the approval timeline for these vaccines is uncertain.

>>> MORE: Coronavirus: FDA grants full approval for Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine

And, in the meantime, there’s no way of knowing what proportion of those who aren’t vaccinated did so for reasons similar to Elaine Owusu-Ansh. In fact, most of the two dozen who came to Ashland’s clinic for the initial vaccination were 12-year-olds, an age group actually excluded from the FDA’s endorsement language.

But Ashland COVID-19 coordinator Sergeant Ed Burman said that was just the demographic they were hoping to reach.

“We thought it would be important, even though we’re part of a collaboration, to have some kind of clinic in our community before school starts,” Burman said.

The “collaborative” Burman refers to the successful vaccination of a large number of MetroWest residents in several cities last spring, just after the approval of the Pfizer vaccine for use in adolescents.

“We were doing almost 1,000 people a day over a six-week period,” Burman said.

The figures suggest that these days of “mass vaccination” may be over for good. Sixty-five percent of Massachusetts residents are now fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Yet with the rise of the Delta variant and its propensity to cause groundbreaking infections, as well as the return of schools, the government’s call for recalls – and now the first FDA approval – many clinic dates have been made. scheduled for next month at Ashland, Framingham and other MetroWest Locations.