Prior to official vaccine guidance, some Americans have already been involved in “booster mania” :: WRAL.com

Jessica Ferger, CNN

CNN — Ted Rall crossed the state border in February and March for a double-dose Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. It wasn’t possible to book in New York City, but his friend told him about a federal facility in New Jersey with no residence requirements, so he drove there twice.

The Covid-19 shot (his third) that Lal had at the end of July was much easier and much more convenient to get, despite the US Food and Drug Administration and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he said. Says. And prophylaxis currently does not recommend the Covid-19 vaccine booster to anyone.

57-year-old Lal said he just stepped into a CVS pharmacy in Manhattan, didn’t need an appointment, and wanted to vaccinate the pharmacist with the Covid-19 vaccine. He pretended that it was his first dose.

Caricature and writer Lal states that he has a history of asthma and serious respiratory illnesses such as swine flu and pneumonia. His antibody test was negative, but he suspects he was infected with Covid-19 early in the pandemic. He lives in a county where more contagious Delta variants are devastating the country and more than 98% of the U.S. population is believed to have a “high” or “substantial” Covid-19 infection. I’m not interested in seizing opportunities because I’m out. CDC.

“I want to stay protected, you know, and I think it’s pretty clear that this will become the norm, and it could be just like a month or two,” Lal told CNN. .. “Everyone is trying to do that, why wait until it’s hard to get a promise again?”

Ral may be right about the timeline. A Biden administration official told CNN last week that internal talks at the FDA are considering early September to develop a strategy for Covid-19 booster shots. Decisions for people with immunodeficiency and high risk of the virus are expected sooner, officials said.

Vaccine advisors from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet on Friday to discuss boosters and doses for people with immunodeficiency.

And the FDA is already considering full approval of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. This is a decision that can happen in the coming weeks. All Covid-19 vaccines are currently available in the United States under an emergency use authorization. Full approval may mean that a fully vaccinated one can get an additional vaccine if the doctor considers it legitimate-long before the booster’s recommendation.

Although the vaccines available provide strong protection for most people, studies have shown that people with weakened immunity cannot build adequate protection from standard doses of the Covid-19 vaccine. Recent studies have also suggested that some protection from mRNA vaccines declines over time for all.

In addition to FDA approval, Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, said a direct message was created that boosts were needed, even for immunocompromised people and the elderly. I told CNN. It is a kind of “booster mania” in the United States.

He said the FDA’s approval “opens everything up to those who are concerned about getting a doctor’s prescription. It only adds to the confusion.”

Booster “We are not there yet”

Lal’s own decision to look for a booster was driven by all the research he read, including data from the Israeli Secretary of Health released last month. This suggests that the overall efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine against all Covid-19 infections was reduced to only 39%. In people vaccinated earlier that year, their data show that the vaccine is still 91.4% effective in preventing serious illness.

Other data published by both Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna show that both vaccines have decreased antibody levels over time.

But that doesn’t mean that protection is over, and boosters aren’t yet recommended to anyone.

On Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that data on how long the vaccine’s durability lasts are still limited.

“After all, it’s a very careful adherence to the durability of the protection,” Forch said. “And when you follow it, you see and see what percentage of protection you get when you go monthly.”

He said, health officials would recommend boosters for the general public when data indicate that protection falls below a certain threshold.

In a conversation hosted by Brown University on Tuesday, Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Pennsylvania Children’s Hospital, said, “We know that vaccinated people need a booster dose. It will cross the border. ” , Despite being fully vaccinated, is hospitalized, in the ICU, or dying.

“We are not there yet.”

So far, the vaccine is working. CNN analysis of CDC data suggests that more than 99.9% of fully vaccinated people do not experience a serious breakthrough infection.

It’s also unclear what risks the additional shots could pose. Topol says it’s best to sit for a few more weeks and warns that those who just want to go to the booster need to consider potential side effects.

“I don’t know if boosters will protect them. These boosters are aimed at the original strain, which is the same problem as with vaccines,” says Topol. “They intend to raise people’s neutralizing antibodies over the next few weeks and will help to some extent, but they aren’t aimed at Delta, so I don’t know how much.”

Ral, who recently wrote about his experience getting booster shots in The Wall Street Journal, says he wasn’t worried about the potential risks at all.

“If you said that this vaccine would kill me in 10 years, or because this horrifying delta mutant is on the market, I’ll go get it now, and I think I’ll survive it. No, “he said.

And it wasn’t hard for him to get a booster-Lal says the pharmacy didn’t ask him a single question and didn’t look at his immune records.

A spokeswoman for the company when asked how CVS would determine if a person who came to either the pharmacy or Minute Clinics to get the Covid-19 vaccine had not yet been vaccinated. “People who have been fully vaccinated at a CVS pharmacy, or who have been notified that they have been completely vaccinated by another provider, cannot be vaccinated with another vaccine under current CDC guidelines. In some cases, pharmacists may state You may be able to check the vaccination status of the patient by registering the vaccine. “

CVS would not have understood that Lal had already been fully vaccinated in New Jersey, as the immune registries were state-controlled and had been vaccinated for the third time in New York.

Rebecca Coyle, executive director of the American Immunization Registry Association, said the state is currently delinquent with more than normal amounts of immune information. States must agree to share immune data with each other.

“I’m not pointing out a loophole, but at this point there is no good data exchange across state boundaries,” she said.

Booster plan in progress

Some individuals are looking for boosters, but some are planning to boost vaccines for certain people.

The city of San Francisco has been vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson Coronavirus one-shot vaccine and is accepting people who wish to receive either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine boosters. City Public Health Service officials said last week that the agency is creating “accommodation” for those who consulted doctors, and it does not recommend additional doses or policy changes.

In an email to CNN, Dr. Peter Hotez, director of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said the United States was relatively early on the third mRNA for people receiving immunosuppressive therapy, especially solid organ transplant recipients. He said he believed he would probably move on to the second J & J shot. The next question is what other immunodeficiency conditions are included. Then the next question is whether the United States wants to add boosters for people over the age of 60-Israel has just announced plans to do so.

Germany, the United Kingdom and France also have boosters for the most vulnerable populations, even though the World Health Organization requested a moratorium of booster shots last week, at least until September, until the vaccine is distributed more equitably around the world. Announced the program.

This is very ironic for Ral. Lal says he wouldn’t consider looking for a third shot unless it was clear that people hesitating to get the vaccine weren’t using many vaccines, especially in the South.

“But even when I talked to local doctors and pharmacists here in New York, they all had a lot of unused vaccines, which I thought was ridiculous.”

Lal has been quietly using vaccine doses as a booster set to expire for himself and his family by doctors since sharing his experience with others for months. I heard that you are doing it. “There is a basement there, and there are many doctors who have access to these doses, and they are using them rather than throwing them away.”

People close to Lal weren’t too surprised by his decision to get a booster shot. “My friend knows I’m an independent thinker. I know that policy makers are trying to save a lot of people, so I don’t really care about the” official conclusions “from policy makers. I don’t or I don’t respect it very much. People as much as possible, at the lowest possible cost. That is their job. “

“Because I care about myself first and foremost, the calculus is different.”

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