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One more day to comment on CDC's COVID immunization policy [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-09-07

From PBS NewsHour:

..[T]he updated booster is not intended for everyone. It’s for people in high-risk groups – those who are age 75 or older, pregnant or immunocompromised, said [director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Dr. Paul Offit], who serves on the FDA’s expert panel that reviewed the vaccine companies’ data. Individuals in this group, he explained, stand to benefit the most in part because they account for a disproportionate number of COVID hospitalizations and deaths. The general public should not expect to need to receive the latest COVID booster, Offit said.

The CDC has one day (Friday, September 8) left to submit public comments and you can do so at this federal website.

I’m as vaccinated and boostered as an American can get and when I contracted COVID the last week of July, I was absolutely laid out — first symptom was convulsions, fevers in the 102s, SpO2 down to 91. This is the second sickest I have ever been (flu, 1999). It took me three tries and five hours on a Saturday, before I reached quite that level of illness, with my daughter driving me around, to get a prescription for Paxlovid even though I’m going to be 60 years old soon and am not on any regular meds. I had my fourth COVID shot (Pfizer) nine months earlier. Had an updated booster that would have been more effective against the variant I contracted been available to me in the interim, I would have taken it as soon as I could, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that if I had, I would not have gotten as close as I did to hospitalization. As a federal agency that caved to pressure from Donald Trump to minimize the threat COVID posed, the CDC doubly owes the American people robust policies and protections and proactive pandemic surveillance and response. Getting updated COVID boosters to the widest population possible on a regular basis — much as has been done with influenza for many years — after having lost over 1.1 million Americans to the disease seems like the minimum public health response that should be on offer now that vaccine manufacturers have adapted to at least perfunctorily chasing COVID variants undergoing community spread.

To ration updated boosters to those most likely to die if infected devalues the health and safety of the rest of us, leaving us not much better off than if we had never received vaccines and boosters at all (my shots may have done a little to help, but I’ll never know; the Paxlovid brought on a dramatic improvement about 18 hours after I began taking it). This is to say nothing of how increased spread amplifies the production of new variants for which even the latest vaccines may be barely effective and/or be even more contagious. We have masks, what little isolation we can get, and what ventilation we can get to keep us from getting infected but all we have to improve our lot before the fact once we are infected are vaccines.

So consider going to this page on regulations.gov and leaving your comments Friday. We deserve better than this. Don’t let them leave most of us all but defenseless.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/7/2192143/-One-more-day-to-comment-on-CDC-s-COVID-immunization-policy

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