America’s exploding vaccination crisis has to be addressed now
Two senior FDA officials, including Dr. Robert Califf, the agency head, recently published a journal article entitled, “Is Vaccination Approaching a Dangerous Tipping Point?” They make a compelling case for the crisis we face:
“Despite the care taken in the development and deployment of vaccines and their clear and compelling benefit of saving individual lives and improving population health outcomes, an increasing number of people in the US are now declining vaccination for a variety of reasons, ranging from safety concerns to religious beliefs.”
Vaccination is a pillar of disease prevention. The CDC estimates that, worldwide, between 2021 and 2030, more than 50 million deaths will have been prevented through immunization.
The U.S. cannot afford widespread rejection of vaccines, but Califf ’s proposed remedy is weak, essentially focusing the responsibility for educating the public on “all those directly interacting with individuals in a health care setting, ranging from front office staff to retail pharmacists to primary care physicians.”
Health care providers cannot do it alone. Government officials, especially at the top of the food chain, need to be part of the solution.
For a start, Califf should meet with White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, whose previous job was White House coronavirus response coordinator, grab him by the lapels, and give him a proper tongue-lashing. The White House has been letting senior health care officials get away with murder. Literally. The CDC director, NIH director, U.S. surgeon general, HHS secretary and assistant secretary for health — and Califf, himself, for that matter — have been invisible. For all the public knows, they could have entered the Federal Witness Protection Program and be flipping burgers somewhere in Wyoming.
How bad is the current situation? COVID is a case in point. During the most recent week of data reported by the CDC (Jan. 7-13), although COVID emergency room visits and hospitalizations nationwide were down week-over-week, hospitalizations remained shockingly high, at almost 33,000. COVID deaths were up 10.3% from the previous week, to more than 1,500.
Fortunately, the concentration in wastewater of the virus that causes COVID, which is an early predictor of future infections, is trending downward, but is still at worrisome levels. Levels of virus in wastewater can be used to estimate the number of infections in real-time, and according to infectious disease modeler J.P. Weiland, the U.S. was experiencing more than 1.2 million cases of COVID daily as of January 10. That means that every week, millions of people become infected and become susceptible to the ravages of long COVID, and that the COVID virus continues to reproduce and mutate.
And yet, only 19% of eligible Americans have gotten the most recent COVID vaccine booster. What’s more, unfounded fears over the COVID vaccine have led to increasing rejection of other vaccines with years of proven effectiveness. Vaccine rejection is being found increasingly in pediatric patients, which has led to measles outbreaks in the unvaccinated as herd immunity has been breached. There is even what veterinarians have dubbed “canine vaccine hesitancy.” An article published last year in the journal Vaccine found that “a large minority of dog owners consider vaccines administered to dogs to be unsafe (37%), ineffective (22%), and/or unnecessary (30%),” and that a majority of dog owners (53%) hold one or more of those opinions.
We need a multi-pronged public education campaign with participation from politicians and celebrities of all stripes. Think of a widely distributed public service announcement video (including during the Super Bowl) that shows President Joe Biden and Donald Trump getting shingles vaccinations and Taylor Swift and Oprah Winfrey getting a COVID booster.
We can and must do better.