Health officials are banking on vaccinations to prevent monkeypox and polio before they become a permanent threat in the United States. They are relying on updated boosters to restore weakened immunity against COVID-19. With influenza expected this decline in the US, flu shots could be crucial to preventing serious illness and keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed.
While the federal government will facilitate states to receive these immunizations, it will be 2,820 state and local health departments that will lead the work on shot-in-the-arms, and public health experts say it’s not clear where these offices are. Have enough money or employees. get the job done.
“I think it’s very worrying,” said Dr. Peggy Hamburg, a former New York City health commissioner and former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. “It’s hard to imagine how state and local health departments can mobilize, and they are in dire need of, additional support.”
“I think we have to recognize that this is a very vulnerable time,” said Hamburg, who recently chaired a commission for the non-profit Commonwealth Fund to modernize the nation’s public health system.
After nearly three years of battling vaccine hesitancy, politics and a global pandemic, the country’s public health workers are dismayed and abandoning their positions. More than 1 in 4 health department leaders quit their jobs during the pandemic, some following harassment and death threats. Studies are underway to measure how deeply those losses extend to their employees.
Now, these defunct agencies are being asked to deal with new threats like monkeypox without additional funding to handle them.
‘Overwhelmed is a silence’
Can these agencies pull it off?
“Probably not,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in an email to CNN. “Public health is chronically underappreciated and understudied. Adequate capacity was built up during the COVID-19 response – for example, contact tracing teams – but many jurisdictions have wound up that infrastructure. COVID money is largely inflexible, so it can’t really be used for other threats like monkeypox.”
The country’s vaccinators say they are struggling.
“Overwhelmed is an understatement,” said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers.
Hannan said its members have not received any funds to run a vaccination campaign against monkeypox. Yet they’ve only been asked how the vaccine is given, switching from a more familiar under-the-skin injection to a shallow method that squeezes the vaccine between layers of skin, something that needs to be done correctly. requires training. The hope is that intradermal shots, which require one-fifth of the regular dose, could quickly increase the supply of this hard-to-find vaccine.
As a result, vaccination managers are scrambling to find the money and staff to order vaccines, manually track inventory, move shots to the places where they are needed, train providers. and collect data and send it back to federal health agencies such as US centers. Disease control and prevention.
On top of that, orders have begun for updated boosters to protect against the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of the Omicron strain of the new coronavirus, which have been promised to Americans by mid-September.
The allocations in these initial orders were lower than anticipated, Hannan said, which is forcing city and state health officials to develop plans for who should be the first to receive them, initially seeking supplies. .
Additionally, several cities are testing their sewage for poliovirus after it was recently found in Rockland County, New York and New York City. If additional community spread is suspected, areas may need to conduct vaccination campaigns to protect residents who have not been shot, such as recent immigrants or young children who missed routine vaccinations during the pandemic Were.
Children usually get four doses of the polio vaccine by the age of six in the US, but many children miss out on their shots. Globally, the pandemic led to the biggest drop in childhood vaccination rates in 30 years, according to the World Health Organization. Health officials fear that the erosion of this coverage may have set the stage for the return of other infectious diseases such as measles.
“A break or lag in the delivery of vaccines prepares us for further outbreaks,” said Dr Davidson Hammer, an infectious disease specialist at Boston University.
Distrust fosters hostility and hesitation
Vaccines are considered one of the greatest victories of modern medicine, second only to clean water as a cost-effective health intervention. Every year, they prevent millions of deaths around the world. In their first year of use, COVID-19 vaccines prevented nearly 20 million deaths, a recent study found.
Yet the hesitation of vaccines has increased due to misinformation on social media. While more than three-quarters of Americans have been vaccinated against COVID-19, 19% say they will definitely not get a COVID-19 vaccine.
If all these challenges weren’t enough, annual flu shots are about to begin soon, and they could be especially important this fall.
Influenza returned to Australia this year for the first time since the pandemic began. United States health officials are watching Australia’s flu season closely to see what could happen here. They are forecasting that we may see more flu transmission this year than in the past two years, and that flu vaccination will be important to prevent hospitalizations and deaths.
“I think we have a perfect storm in the vaccine world right now in this country,” said Michael Osterholm, who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
He points out that even though the average daily Covid-19 deaths are much lower than in 2020 and 2021, the US still averages over 400 a day, making it the country’s fourth leading cause of death. According to the CDC, most of those deaths are in unvaccinated people.
Overall, more than 1 in 5 Americans are still unimmunized against COVID-19, and that number is unlikely to budge. The vaccination rate is mostly stable.
Rebuilding trust in vaccines will require a more robust public health workforce, and a better funded one.
A recent study by The De Beaumont Foundation, a nonprofit working to strengthen public health, found that the public health system needs more than 80,000 full-time employees – 80% over current staffing levels. To provide basic community services, such as monitoring and controlling the spread of infectious diseases.
Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of that organization, says that America will not be able to reinstate its public health workers unless people value and respect their work.
“What we have seen during Covid is an anti-fringe movement that threatens our country’s safety, security and economic prosperity,” Castrucci said. “It’s going to be harder and harder to get vaccinated.”
He said, “We are privileged as a society that we haven’t seen children suffering from polio. No one has iron lungs. And it has given us some degree of leeway for the potential of what could really be.” numbed,” he said. “These are viral diseases.”
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)