Who Should Get The Covid Vaccine This Fall?

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Transcript

00:00FDA approved the new COVID-19 vaccine, and they approved it specifically for use in individuals

00:09over the age of 65 or individuals under the age of 65 who have at least one pre-existing condition

00:16that makes them more likely to develop severe COVID-19 after infection. The two messenger RNA

00:25vaccines that are available, the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine, are very similar in many

00:32ways. The exception being that the Moderna vaccine is approved for individuals down to six months of

00:38age, whereas the Pfizer vaccine is only approved for individuals down to the age of five years.

00:44Prior to this year, the vaccine was approved for all individuals either five years of age or over

00:50or six months of age or older, depending on which vaccine you were working with. So the FDA approval

00:56was much more broader and set the stage for a more precise recommendation of who actually is

01:03recommended to get the vaccine, which is done by the Centers for Disease Control. There's no doubt that

01:09the current FDA recommendations for what the COVID vaccine should be used for targets populations that

01:15we know are vulnerable to severe disease. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't think about the fact

01:22that there are actually other portions of the population that do suffer from severe disease, albeit at

01:28lower rates. And what this essentially does is it takes that vaccine off the plate for use in other

01:34populations. Particularly, one of the populations that's surging right now is children under the age of 12

01:41and emergency room visits for COVID in that population. That's the number one population

01:47right now. The CDC is going to be making the true recommendations for who gets the vaccine.

01:57And that may be even more restrictive than what the FDA has said. And so we're still waiting for an

02:02official CDC verification of who should be getting the vaccine. Again, that hasn't happened yet.

02:09And COVID is happening right now. So, you know, we run the risk of delaying the rollout of the vaccine

02:16while we go through some of these regulatory hurdles. The FDA guidance will limit accessibility of

02:24the vaccine to individuals because it puts additional hurdles in place for otherwise healthy individuals

02:32to get the vaccine. We normally don't talk to our medical doctors or physicians

02:38physicians about a vaccine. For many vaccines, simply talking to the pharmacist administering the

02:44vaccine is enough to gauge whether a person is eligible and would like to get the vaccine.

02:52This makes things much more complicated. And when things get complicated, we see vaccine uptake go down.