To boost or not to boost. That seems to have become the new question every fall as new variants of COVID-19 develop and big pharma companies like Pfizer and Moderna offer new booster shots to, hopefully, combat the effects of the new variants.
This year, boosters have been developed to mitigate the impacts of the newest variant with new letters and numbers attached to it. Most people don’t care what the new variant is called. What they are interested in is how dangerous it is and whether or not they need a new vaccine or even if the vaccines are necessary.
The hope, of course, is that people will see COVID-19 boosters as the same kind of necessity as most view the flu shot – a fall rite of passage to help keep people from getting extremely ill and to avoid hospitalizations.
According to a recent article by Kaiser Health Foundation, most people will skip getting the booster for this new variant. About 75% of people in the United States appear to have skipped last year’s bivalent booster, and nothing suggests uptake will be better this time around.
While the original vaccines and the first set of boosters appeared to have been shown to strongly protect people against severe COVID-19 illness and death, and more modestly prevent infection, the effects have diminished over time. Intensive outreach efforts on vaccination in 2021 have mostly ended, and even with recent upticks in COVID hospitalizations, many Americans – mostly along political or other demographic lines, remain skeptical about the shots.
This skepticism shows just how badly government leaders and world health organizations mismanaged communicating about the COVID-19 pandemic when it began in late 2019. There are a number of reasons, in my opinion, about how we got here.
First, there were many, many mixed messages coming from health officials about the cause and the origin of the pandemic. Governments got involved, and the pandemic quickly became politicized. There was no or very little transparency about how the pandemic started, and politically correct strategies were begun to downplay China’s role in the beginning of the pandemic.
Then, in the U.S. in particular, we were in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election. Polarization was already at an all-time high. Many more left-leaning politicians were in favor of massive shutdowns and stringent public health requirements the likes of which this generation had never seen. Even right-leaning public leaders started getting on board with these mandates; however, the messages coming from high-ranking U.S. health officials continued to confuse government leaders.
The call by President Donald Trump for the quick development of a vaccine, called Operation Warp Speed, should be applauded and was, by and large a success. However, political partisanship again got in the way when the media, health “experts” and Democratic political leaders were vocal about their skepticism that a vaccine could be developed in such a short amount of time – probably because of the distrust of Trump.
In a presidential debate, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t get the vaccine, saying she didn’t trust the Trump administration’s push to rush a coronavirus vaccine into production.
The federal government’s top COVID advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, joined the skeptics: In February 2020 and again in April 2020 he predicted that a year to a year and a half would be required for vaccine approval — versus the half year that was actually required.
“No doubt, Operation Warp Speed is a huge success,” said Tinglong Dai, associate professor of Operations Management and Business Analytics at Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School in Baltimore.
The original vaccines were shown to be highly effective in mitigating the extreme illness and death from COVID.
Yet, the partisan divide about vaccines is stark with a majority of Republicans rejecting the vaccines and even questioning their safety. The reason I can think of for this skepticism is that once the vaccines were shown to be effective, Democrat political leaders jumped on the bandwagon to impose mandates for people to take the vaccine. Once inaugurated as president, Joe Biden called for a federal mandate for employers to ensure employees were vaccinated.
Americans, in general, are not fans of government mandates.
There was and continue to be a whole lot of circumstances, conspiracy theories and downright misinformation about Covid vaccines and boosters, and apparently the general public has still not reconciled the partisan communications mismanagement that has occurred.
Unfortunately, the public has been pretty much left to fend for ourselves in trying to rationalize our decisions regarding the vaccines. We are generally skeptical that what government “experts” tell us through the media is correct; we are generally skeptical of the billions of dollars the drug companies making these vaccines are making, and we are still not getting the transparent information we need from the government, public health officials and drug companies about these variants and the vaccines. And, we continue to be mired in our own partisan biases that have been developed about the pandemic over the last three years.
Here’s what I know from my own personal experience. Before the COVID vaccines were developed, eight of my friends or close acquaintances died from COVID. I took the vaccines and the boosters through last year, and I have not, yet, ever gotten COVID. Several people I know have gotten COVID, even after being vaccinated; however, they didn’t end up severely ill. I know of one friend who got the latest variant of COVID, even though he’s been vaccinated all along the way, and he ended up hospitalized and on a ventilator this summer. Thankfully, he appears to be recovering.
COVID is unpredictable, and it will have different impacts. The only thing I can think to do is to communicate with my personal physician about my own personal health and be vigilant about any symptoms or changes.
I’ll be getting my flu shot in a few weeks, and I will be considering whether to get the new COVID booster as well. I haven’t decided yet whether I will or won’t. I will continue to research my options and apply common sense to my personal situation.
That’s about the best any of us can do.
Cindy Allen 