CDC advisory panel members vote against vaccine priority plan

WA Center for Poultry Disease Control and Prevention Advisory Committee Vote on Tuesday With health care providers – – must be at the front of the line to recommend residents of long-term care facilities – for Kovid-19 vaccines, the voice of dissatisfaction alone came from a researcher who studies vaccines in older adults.

Helen Keep’s Talbot – better known as her middle – raised serious concerns during the Advisory Committee meeting on vaccination practices about the use of vaccines in the elderly elderly, noting that the vaccine in this population There is no data yet to suggest the work of.

65 and older are to be included in all US-based Phase 3 trials of Kovid vaccines. But no one has specifically tested vaccines in those who are in long-term care. He said that the findings cannot be made in people over 65 years of age who are sufficiently healthy for clinical testing and have signs in all demographics.

advertisement

At an earlier ACIP meeting, Talbot warned that vaccinating this population at the onset of a vaccine rollout is risky, as long-term care residents have a high rate of medical events that are as a side effect of vaccination. May be confusing and may reduce confidence in vaccines. . “And I think you’re going to do a lot of striking backlash, ‘My grandmother got the vaccine and died,” she said at the time.

STAT spoke to Talbot, an associate professor of infectious diseases at Gender Over Vanderbilt University, asking why he voted against putting residents of long-term care in “Phase 1A” for the use of the Kovid-19 vaccine, which presumably Will be rolled. In the second half of December.

advertisement

The dialogue is lightly edited for clarity and length.

It was a bit unusual to see ACIP – which is an evidence-based decision-making group – make a recommendation on the assumption that vaccines would work in the frail elderly.

I think they based it on data. It was just data on the number of deaths in that population. The number of deaths in that population is far out of proportion to the number of infected. And that was the driving reason for that vote.

Study vaccines in the elderly. Let me know if you think vaccinating people with long-term care is not the right way.

I think if we have data it is the right way.

He is the kicker. We routinely, and most recently for almost all of our adult vaccinations, tested them in college-aged children and army recruits and saw that they worked and used them as an older adult.

The first example is the flu. In 1960, the surgeon general said, well, it works in young, healthy adults, so it should work at least partially in older adults. Since 1960, “because it can work partially.”

We need to hold back from believing that these vaccines work and actually design them and test them in this population and make proper use of them.

Are you worried that these are wastes that are going to go to waste?

I will not say in vain. But they were not used as efficiently as they could.

If I know it works in a healthy health care worker, I get all health care workers vaccinated, so that when they are around vulnerable elderly people, they do not make the elderly elderly sick.

We do not yet have enough vaccines for all health care workers. We eventually, but we won’t yet.

Do you have any safety concerns about the use of the vaccine in long-term care residents?

More than anyone else? No, but I think we have a randomized control trial to look at safety data for the adult population in general.

What do you mean?

If something happened to me after the vaccine, we could go back to the randomized control trial data and see if it happened in both groups? Whether or not the placebo group happened. We cannot do this for a long-term care facility because no testing was done at a long-term care facility.

And you can’t remove it from the normal step 3 test?

We can try. But it is not certain. Because it is a separate population with different comradeship and fradley.

And 30, 60, or whatever after vaccination, the likelihood of something like stroke or even death is very high among long-term care residents …

[Talbot nods vigorously.]

Here is the deal. All events are to be temporarily linked. But how do you explain that the nurse’s aide who is taking care of that patient and loves her like her grandmother? Then who decides that she is not going to get vaccinated and asks everyone else not to get vaccinated?

In the general population, the way you tease whether a health event seen after vaccination is due to it or it is temporarily linked – it has happened around the same time – is by knowing the baseline rates of such events. Can say: It is within the range of strokes we would expect to see in the population over this amount of time.

Are those incidence rates not known to long-term care residents?

I reduced the mortality rate in nursing homes and found nothing. Now, I get a call with a group of geriatricians and I ask. Some of them – not all of them – knew that data. I don’t know how common that knowledge is.

What is your fear How do you see it playing?

I am afraid of losing faith in the vaccine. This vaccine would be really safe, but there would be temporarily interconnected programs and people would be afraid to use the vaccine. And we won’t be able to get our children back to school and people to work – the things that matter.