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Things, I think, may be about to get a lot better.
Suddenly, we are on the verge of receiving COVID-19 vaccinations in our offices. It seems that the pandemic started a lifetime ago, but little more than a year has passed. And it seems like yesterday (and an eternity ago) that we received our vaccinations for the first time.
On December 11, 2020, “The US Food and Drug Administration issued the first Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for a vaccine for the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in people over 16 years of age “. (From an announcement on the FDA website)
Since the first vaccines were approved for emergency use in our country, getting vaccines to our patients has been an enormous challenge and a burden that sometimes seemed insurmountable. The vaccination sites were these massive places far away, with a lot of rules and restrictions. Our patients wondered why they couldn’t just stop by our office, or just walk into these sites.
To schedule an appointment for a vaccine, patients need to have access to a smartphone or computer, and even with that, they have to click and click and click. Sites keep dropping and vaccination time slots that seem to be available one minute suddenly disappear.
There has been a lot of confusion about who is eligible, when and what needs to happen in order to get the vaccine. Do you need a letter from your doctor or not? Does my condition qualify? What the heck is self-attestation? Every step of the way there seem to be more and more obstacles that patients face, things that make it increasingly difficult to get vaccines into the arms of the people who need them.
But all of a sudden there seems to be a moment of possibility and a feeling that things are going to get a lot better. Having vaccines in our offices, as well as in neighborhood pharmacies, will go a long way toward ensuring that everyone has access to the vaccine they want.
Some have been waiting for the next iterations, discouraged by the new vaccine technology despite all the guarantees we could muster. And many have been waiting for the single-dose version, which can also improve access and improve completion rates. But over the next several weeks, we will begin applying these vaccines in our office, probably for patients who already have an appointment scheduled. In the meantime, we are simultaneously setting up alternate sites nearby, where patients who do not have appointments scheduled for an office visit will also be able to receive a dose.
If you think about it, the processes we started with made the vaccine seem somewhat unattainable and put a lot more pressure on the system to get everything to work properly. But when the patient can receive a vaccine for COVID-19 as easily as walking into a corner pharmacy, or when they are also on a doctor’s visit, this should normalize it and make it much more rational. plus a normal part of the daily healthcare landscape. I can only hope this is just the beginning of making COVID-19 vaccines a routine part of our healthcare, as common as checking your blood pressure, getting lab tests to measure your cholesterol, getting a mammogram, or getting vaccinated against it. flu. .
The success of allowing science to create this vaccine and having a working public health infrastructure to deliver it has done a great deal to ensure that our society can survive this period. Having it delivered to routine office visits and other settings without much confusion will help remove some of the politicization that has come with this virus, this vaccine, and this pandemic.
We are not out of the woods yet; we still have a huge caseload to deal with, as well as the risks posed by the hodgepodge of lifting restrictions across the country. And the emergence of potentially more infectious and deadly variants adds a huge and terrifying unknown to the calculation of what is to come.
We have to move on with everything else: the masks, the hand washing, the social distancing, and the common sense that has led us thus far. And we don’t yet know how long immunity lasts, and if those who are vaccinated can still transmit the disease, but we hope these answers are available.
For now, I’m happy that starting in, we hope, just a few days, we can, at the end of your office visit, order routine blood tests, an EKG, a bone density test, and a COVID-19 vaccine. And everything will seem normal, just a regular part of your doctor visit, nothing special or magical here.
When in fact there is.
Fred N. Pelzman, MD, of Weill Cornell Internal Medicine Associates and weekly blogger from MedPage today, follows what is happening in the world of primary care medicine from the perspective of his own practice.
