Since 2021, Covid vaccines and boosters have been widely available at doctor’s offices, hospitals and drug stores here in America. After my first Covid vaccine and booster shot – both of which were administered by Virginia’s mass-vaccination program – I’ve gotten boosters from local Walgreens or CVS drugstores. They double-check their database and bam, I get the shot for free and it’s all easy-peasy. As it should be. The goal is to get as many people vaccinated and up-to-date with the latest tailor-made boosters for variants. Same with the flu shot, which I’ve been getting annually for many years now. Enter Robert Kennedy Jr and his brain worm. Kennedy is an anti-vaxx lunatic and he’s now in charge of Health and Human Services, which gives him a huge amount of control over national vaccine availability and more. HHS is now changing their recommendations for Covid vaccines and boosters. Basically, if you’re not over 65 years old, you may be turned away if you try to get a vaccine or booster.
The Food and Drug Administration will permit use of Covid vaccines by adults over 65 and those with certain medical conditions in the fall, but may require additional studies before approving the shots for healthy Americans younger than 65, agency officials said on Tuesday.
At this point, the additional doses offer “uncertain” benefits to many young and middle-aged people who have already been vaccinated or have had Covid, Dr. Vinay Prasad, the F.D.A.’s vaccine division chief, and Dr. Martin Makary, the agency’s commissioner, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine.
“The F.D.A. will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” the officials wrote.
Until now, annual Covid shots were recommended for everyone aged 6 months and older. Scientific advisers to the F.D.A. are set to meet Thursday to decide on the composition of the Covid vaccine to be made available in the fall. During the pandemic, both Dr. Prasad and Dr. Makary sharply criticized vaccine mandates and other public health measures intended to turn back the coronavirus.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, is a longtime vaccine skeptic who spent years campaigning against the Covid shots, falsely claiming at one point that the Covid vaccines had killed more people than the virus.
As a measles outbreak spreads through Texas and other states this year, Mr. Kennedy has offered only muted support for vaccinations and has repeatedly raised questions about the safety of the measles shot while suggesting, falsely, that miracle treatments, like cod liver, oil were available.
This is so mind-numbingly stupid. One of the first rules of every public-health agency in the world is “Salus populi suprema lex esto” – “The health of the people should be the supreme law.” The whole idea is to make vaccines widely available to the greatest number of people, and to increase accessibility across the board. It’s cheaper to give away free covid vaccines than have the strain on the hospital system of hundreds of thousands of middle-aged unvaccinated people with covid! This is also the idea behind free and easy access to flu shots – it’s less strain on the medical system (and less expensive overall) for fewer people to have the flu. Anyway, I guess very few of us are getting Covid boosters this fall. I doubt flu shots will be available either.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid.
