NBC News
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated their guide on the COVID-19 vaccine, which recommends them for people over 65, only after consulting with a doctor or pharmacist.
The interim director of the CDC, Jim O’Neill, approved the recommendations of an agency advisory panel last week, ending months of confusion and concern about the Vaccine against COVID-19 this season.
Earlier this year, the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dismissed the 17 members of the influential vaccine panel and replaced them with people of their choice, many of whom have spoken against those vaccines.
Kennedy, who has sown misinformation about vaccines and has falsely described that of the COVID-19 as “the deadliest vaccine ever manufactured”, took measures in May to limit their access, when he eluded the usual regulatory process and announced that the CDCs would no longer recommend vaccines against COVID-19 for healthy children and pregnant women.
The CDC statement does not mean that people under 65 are prohibited from getting vaccinated against COVID-19, since they can do so after consulting with a doctor or pharmacist.
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This measure essentially “puts a new small barrier” to get vaccinated, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, global health professor and infectious diseases at Stanford University. “It is a somewhat vague message that says that your doctor, your medical services provider or your pharmacist should inform you of risks and benefits before vaccinating.”
The CDC said that the recommendations of the vaccine panel for people under 65 considered that the greatest benefits were obtained in people with the greatest risk of severe COVID due to underlying conditions. The benefits of vaccination were minor for people under 65 who did not present a higher risk of severe COVID.
However, the ease of vaccinating against COVID-19 can depend on each person’s residence.
In previous years, the states used to follow the Vaccination Guidelines of the CDC, in particular those of the Vaccine Advisory Committee, called Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which was considered one of the main authorities regarding vaccination.
Before the announcement of the CDC, 26 states (mostly governed by Democrats) had already established their own guidelines on the COVID-19 vaccine to keep access as wide as possible, according to KFF, a non-partisan health policies research group.
The result is a complex mixture of policies on the Vaccine against COVID-19 throughout the country.
“Now the consensus has been broken between the federal government and the states on how to manage immunization against COVID,” said Offer Levy, director of the Boston Children’s hospital precision vaccine program. “We face an unprecedented and very complicated panorama,” he said.
Illinois, Maryland and Washington DC, for example, officially recommend universal vaccination against COVID for all people over 6 months. Other states, such as California, Michigan and Minnesota, recommend the vaccine for all people over 3 years.
“Viruses do not respect state borders,” said Levy. “From the perspective of protecting the public against infectious diseases, the last thing that would be wanted as a strategy is to protect different states differently. It is confusing, it is inconsistent and leaves certain vulnerable people,” he said.
Moreover, some medical consultations may not have any incentive to store the vaccine, since the recommendation of the CDC focuses on older adults. Last season, 23 % of adults and 13 % of children received the COVID-19 vaccine, according to CDC.
“Many people who want the vaccine could not get it due to all these little obstacles that have been put, although, in theory, any person over 6 months should be able to receive it,” said Maldonado, who is also a pediatrician.
In a statement, Amy Thibault, spokesman for CVS Health, said her pharmacies would be ready to manage vaccines against COVID to people 5 years or more as soon as the CDs need their approval.
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Walgreens begins to administer vaccines against COVID from the age of 3. A Walgreens spokesman said in an email that the pharmacy chain “will offer vaccines against COVID-19 of 2025-2026 throughout the country” without the need for medical recipe.
Who needs the COVID-19 vaccine?
Although the increase in cases during the summer seems to have reached its maximum point in most areas of the country, according to CDC data, since the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, a winter wave has been recorded every year.
Like the flu vaccine, the COVID-19 vaccine does not necessarily prevent a person from infected with the virus. However, it reduces the possibilities of suffering a serious illness, being hospitalized or dead.
The updated and modern COVID-19 vaccines are focused on the LP.8.1 variant, which was the dominant strain in the United States earlier this year, but which has been surpassed by newer variants. Novavax’s updated COVID-19 vaccine focuses on an even older strain, called Jn.1.
According to CDCs, as of September 27, LP.8.1 only represents 3 % of all new cases of COVID-19. The dominant strain is currently the so-called XFG, which represents at least 85 % of the new cases of COVID-19. All of them are descendants of the omicron variant, which arose at the end of 2021.
The investigations presented by Modern and Pfizer at a meeting of the FDA Advisory Committee in May revealed that the updated vaccine generated a slightly stronger immune response against the strains that circulated at that time that vaccines against COVID last year.
Normally, immunity develops a few weeks after COVID vaccination.
Is the COVID-19 vaccine free?
Most people with medical insurance who wish to vaccinate against COVID should be able to do it for free this year.
(CDCs will no longer recommend the COVID-19 vaccine to healthy and pregnant children)
Before the meeting of the CDC Advisory Committee, AHIP, a commercial group of the medical insurance sector, said that private plans will continue to cover all the vaccines recommended by the CDC as of September 1, which means that its previous recommendation is still valid to vaccinate against COVID-19 for all people over 6 months.
Medicare, Medicaid and other government health programs will continue to cover vaccines at no cost, according to an HHS spokesman.
