Many seniors skipping new booster
Deaths climb, but no robust outreach effort yet underway
PLEASANT HILL, Calif. — Bonnie Ronk is something of a public health matriarch at the Mt. Diablo Center for seniors in this liberal Northern California suburb.
When Ronk, a greatgrandmother whose red walker bears a sticker saying “El Jefe” (The Leader), tells her peers to pull their masks over their noses, they oblige. When she received both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and a booster and told others to do the same, they did.
But even Ronk, 79, has not gotten the latest COVID19 booster, which was updated to protect against the omicron variant and has been available since September. She said she didn’t know about it.
Across the United States, where about 94% of people 65 and older had their initial COVID-19 vaccines, only 36% have received the updated shot, known as the bivalent booster, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Seniors have offered an array of explanations: They were unaware of it, unable to find it or unconvinced of its value.
As the pandemic barrels into its third winter, and COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths climb once again, medical experts worry that there is no effective plan to update the immunizations of the most vulnerable Americans. Two years ago, when COVID-19 shots were first introduced, the federal government sent teams into thousands of nursing homes and community centers to vaccinate seniors, curbing the devastation of the virus.
But so far this fall, the White House has only offered grants to community
organizations to get shots into the arms of older people, without the clear messaging strategy or logistical support that they need most, many caregivers and nursing home executives said in interviews.
“The governmental and philanthropic support feels nonexistent,” said Debbie Toth, the CEO of the nonprofit Choice in Aging.
The diminishing immunity of seniors has largely transformed the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. from a threat against the unvaccinated to one against the old, many of whom were once well protected. People older than 70 with COVID-19 are being admitted to hospitals at a rate four times higher than that of the general population.
The most recent available death counts by age showed
that almost 90% of COVID19 fatalities were among people older than 65.
“The evidence is clear: Even if you got the shot two years ago, your immunity has waned. But the people who most need to hear that have not,” said Dr. Michael Wasserman, a geriatrician and the public policy chair of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine. “When you combine pandemic fatigue with no real plan from the government together, what we have is a perfect storm.”
The Biden administration’s COVID-19 plan for the winter includes $125 million in grants to two community organizations, USAging and the National Council on Aging, for programs to vaccinate older Americans — a far less direct approach than when it dispatched CVS
and Walgreens workers into care centers after the first shots were authorized. The plan also includes letters to governors encouraging more nursing home shots and a television ad campaign that targets seniors in racial and ethnic minority groups.
Mary Wall, the chief of staff of the White House COVID-19 response team, said the administration was doing what it could with the limited resources available, but acknowledged that this time, the administration was relying on states to shoulder more of the burden.
“We’re really instead asking them directly, please go and host on-site clinics,” she said.
She called the grants “a great start,” but stressed that a more robust financial investment would require cooperation from Congress,
which has repeatedly refused President Joe Biden’s request for an additional $10 billion in health funding, a vast majority of it for the coronavirus response.
“We’ve been trying really hard to look with great sobriety at our resources,” she said.
Public health researchers agree that among all pillars of a national response, widespread vaccination is one of the most valuable. They estimate that COVID-19 shots prevented 650,000 hospitalizations and 300,000 deaths among seniors and Medicare beneficiaries in 2021 alone.
But the virus has since evolved, and the original vaccine formula is no longer a good match for circulating variants, a particular danger to seniors with weakened immune systems and existing health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.
Even the bivalent shot has limited ability to prevent infections from the latest omicron variants, but it is very effective at preventing serious illness and death. According to CDC data, people 50 and older who received multiple boosters had half the risk of dying from the virus than those with just one booster.
Geriatric specialist Dr. Sabine von Preyss-Friedman, the chief medical officer of Avalon Health Care Group, said the apathy among some seniors reflected a misconception about the vaccine’s purpose.
“People are thinking, ‘I got the shot, and I still got COVID, so what’s the point?’ They aren’t thinking about the fact that they got COVID and lived.”