This week the FDA followed the guidance of the CDC to unanimously to expand Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine boosters to everyone 18 and older. The guidance comes on the back of poor uptake of vaccines across the country that have failed to get our population past the line of herd immunity and a spike in cases that are being seen in Europe including Germany, The Netherlands and Austria, all reacting in different ways and important to watch as they are considered a bellwether for the US
While we have seen vaccine resistance in our past this time round the impact of many bad actors who continue to obfuscate the facts and science has caused a big uptick in vaccine hesitancy and resistance. This despite the bodies piling up so fast in some countries like India where they were overrun with funeral pyres. Here in the United States some states were having to bring in freezer trucks to store the overflow of dead bodies from hospitals but our total vaccination rate hovers around 60% – not enough to suppress the virus and allowing for break through infections and more variants of concerns
Raw Transcript
Nick van Terheyden: Hi, this is Dr. Nick, I’m the incrementalist here with incremental insights for better business better health.
Fred Goldstein
And this is Fred Goldstein with accountable healthier helping employers work with their employee health improvement programs. So Nick, some more announcements just out, we now see approval, I guess, for boosters for adults. So what’s up with that?
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah, so they’ve expanded, the approval coming out of the FDA still needs to go to the CDC for actual rollout. But in this instance, we’re now saying instead of just for the finite group of individuals that were deemed that potentially higher risk of disease, so that would have been older patients those with immunosuppressed or immunocompromised that were previously in the group that we said, you should be getting a booster. They’ve now expanded this essentially, for all adults. And my guess is that, at some point, we’ll get that for children as well, just based on the way that things are going, but it couldn’t possibly be for children right now. Why? Because they’ve only just gotten a flu for to get their first doses. But this is across the board, and it’s for Pfizer, and Maderna. And essentially, the guidance is, irrespective of which one you had, you should get your booster from either one or the other. No mention of Johnson and Johnson and I think the prevailing perspective is if you’re going to get a booster, then get it from one of the messenger RNA platforms, that’s Pfizer Maderna to boost your immunity, so that would be the additional third for each of those or they a second dose. If you had Johnson and Johnson single dose,
Fred Goldstein
what was sort of the trigger? What made them think we need to go to this route? Well,
Nick van Terheyden
I believe that we’ve continued to struggle, ultimately with a widespread vaccination campaign. What’s extraordinary to me looking back in history was when the polio vaccine came out, there was widespread acceptance, there was some pushback. I mean, to be clear, we saw similar kinds of activities. But it wasn’t as magnified. I think people looked around and saw the impacts of polio and said, gosh, if I can prevent that, that’s a really good thing. In our current COVID environment, it seems that even though we are seeing lots of people dying, we’ve seen the funeral pyres in countries like India, the shocking examples in New York with freezer trucks, outside hospitals for bodies. But despite that, there was a what I would consider a relatively concerted campaign on the part of some folks who have other vested interests, unscientifically based for my interpretation, mostly based on their financial interests, to prevent people from seeing or understanding that and essentially obfuscating the data and the science. So we saw a very poor uptick as a result of that we have a low or low ish vaccination rate, if we had a higher vaccination rate, I think there will be less concern. At this point, this is another attempt another push to increase vaccination, and prevent as much as possible of the breakthrough, which inevitably, you’re going to see in the population that we have. But primarily what we want is the largest number of people worldwide to be as vaccinated as possible.
Fred Goldstein
Makes sense?
Nick van Terheyden
So what’s going on in the rest of the world, Fred? Well,
Fred Goldstein
since you mentioned worldwide and the rest of the world, obviously, we’re seeing this unbelievable increase of COVID. Rates, deaths, infections in Europe. Not every country, Spain tends to doing better, although they’re they’re taking up a bit. But because of that, we’re also seeing the first country in the Western world to essentially mandate vaccines. And that’s Austria. They’ve got an incredibly difficult problem there with a real high infection rates and we’re seeing now in Germany with them, beginning to say, Wait a second, we’re seeing some infection rates go way up and hospitalizations. There talking now about having the Air Force fly patients around to get them to hospitals with available beds. So it’s really going back to your point about vaccinations, they’re suffering through about the same level of vaccination rate that we see here in the United States. And what’s happened in Europe tend to be a little bit colder climate right now people are going back indoors, that’s probably what’s kicking this thing off. So they’re looking at restrictions and Netherlands are doing some new restrictions as well. It’s really sad to watch it. But it is key, as you pointed out, to get these vaccination rates up.
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah. And to be clear that colder. Climate is a contributor, not because of the temperature, but because it forces people indoors and we start to congregate in settings that don’t have the ventilation, we know that being outside is obviously a protector, because you have fresh air that disperses and reduces the impact. Obviously, something to watch varied across the country. You know, you mentioned Spain, is that because they’re warmer, but they’re sort of, I guess, on the same position as Italy, but they’re seeing higher rates. So I think it’s difficult to tease out, but it’s certainly something that we’re going to watch as part of this. Because if that’s the canary in the coal mine, then you know, we’ve potentially got significant problems. And we’ve also clearly seeing an uptick in flu cases we saw very little throughout the last year across the world. So both hemispheres that get their sweeping across, we saw less of it. We’re certainly already seeing more. So if you haven’t had your flu vaccine, you should be getting that as well.
Fred Goldstein
Yeah. And and thanks for pointing out the indoor versus cold weather point. And the other is I think, Spain, is it about 90% vaccinated. And that’s what’s helping them potentially. That’s what we believe, sit in a better situation right now. Although they are seeing a slight uptick in the last week or so. So be interesting to watch where you’re goes and do we begin to see that here in the United States as we watch some cases uptick here as well. So with that, once again, thanks so much, Nick. It’s been another fantastic week. This is Fred goes through the capital health if you’d like any more information, please reach out to Accountable Health llc.com
Nick van Terheyden
And this is Dr. Nick on the incrementalist and I’m wishing you a very happy and peaceful Thanksgiving. We will be passing on next week’s episode just to give people a break from listening to us, but look forward to rejoining you the following week.
