Emergency medicine physician: Boosters 'aren't getting to those that are higher risk'
Dr. Anand Swaminathan, a emergency medicine physician in New Jersey, joins Yahoo Finance with the latest on booster shots.
Video Transcript
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Pfizer is asking the FDA to expand booster eligibility to all adults. Meantime, after months of progress, California is now seeing a spike in new COVID cases and hospitalizations. Joining us is Dr. Anand Swaminathan, Emergency Medicine Physician in New Jersey. We're also joined by our health care reporter, Anjalee Khemlani.
Doctor, thanks so much for being with us. Good to see you. I have to say from a personal standpoint, I have friends who have already gotten the booster. They're not immunocompromised. They weren't part of that core group of people who are eligible right now. If that eligibility widens to all adults, is that really a game-changer in our fight against COVID?
ANAND SWAMINATHAN: I think the impact of boosters, whether it is the boosters in the way they are right now or expansion, isn't really going to affect very much. I don't think there's going to be a big impact of those boosters for a couple of different reasons. One is that these boosters will temporarily increase the antibodies that are circulating, which then temporarily will improve our effectiveness against fighting COVID in any form.
But it doesn't really give us the long-term immunity that we're looking for-- doesn't really boost that as much, or at least we don't know that it does. And that's really important, because what we're looking to prevent is the hospitalizations and the serious infections. And we don't know that boosters really do that. On top of that, we've got some data out of the Kaiser Family Foundation showing that the groups of people that are getting boosters tend to be higher socioeconomic status, they tend to be whiter, they tend to be older.
And with the exception of the older group, we're not really seeing booster uptake being very high in the higher risk population. So boosters aren't really getting to those that are higher risk. Honestly, I think that boosters right now are a bit of a distraction away from where we should be focused, which is getting first doses, especially since we know that even now, even with Delta surging, the primary doses of the vaccines are highly protective against serious infection, against hospitalization.
And, Alexis, the other thing to note here-- and this is a little bit of an aside-- but right now, the US is administering more boosters than many countries are administering any kind of vaccine, any level of vaccination. And until we get better vaccine equity globally, we're not really going to be able to fight this pandemic. We're going to see more deaths. And we're also going to see the emergence of new and more dangerous variants.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: You know, since the last time we spoke, I guess the big news is that the FDA has granted emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11. You and I have kids in that age group in our households. I'm curious if your kids have gotten their first shot yet.
ANAND SWAMINATHAN: So all of my kids have gotten at least one dose. My 13-year-old is fully vaccinated as of June. My 6 and 10-year-olds have gotten their first doses on Sunday and Monday night, which was very emotional for me, and a little bit emotional for them too. But they're very happy to be on the fast track to joining the fully vaccinated, which is great.
And what we are seeing, and I think the danger right now, is that there are a lot of parents who are a little wary about getting vaccinated. I want to share a quick story, which is that we have a couple of friends in town who have 11-year-olds, just became eligible, but they got COVID just last week. And these are families that have been very conservative with their exposures. They got COVID, and what I think is really important for us to communicate to parents is you don't want to be on the side of waiting too long and your kid getting COVID before you decide to get vaccinated.
And at the same time, in both of those families with 11-year-olds, they have older siblings that got vaccinated, and in spite of the fact that they're in close quarters sharing a home, neither of them got COVID. So this really shows us how protective these vaccines are and how important it is for us to act now to protect our kids.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Doctor Swaminathan, I'm so glad you brought that up, because I think part of this whole conversation obviously has to do with the information that individuals are getting, whether it be parents or just adults who are living out there in the world and not sure what information to trust. So on that topic of misinformation, I know that you're one of the signatories on a letter to Facebook.
And I just want to explore that for a second. Where do you see the role of Facebook and other social media companies in regulating disinformation and being able to really verify some of that information that people are seeing and using to make these decisions?
ANAND SWAMINATHAN: This is really important because over the last two years, we have seen disinformation about vaccines, about masks, about treatments. We still are seeing this coming out. And that disinformation has led to thousands of deaths. It has prolonged the pandemic. It's led to threats against health care workers, which, honestly, two years ago, I never thought that was something that we would be talking about.
Facebook has passively allowed this disinformation. It has actively promoted the disinformation. And at the same time, it has de-emphasized the important, legitimate, reliable resources. And all of those things together really tells us that Facebook is more concerned with their profits than they are with our lives. And that has to change.
Right now, Facebook has blood on their hands by allowing this disinformation to get out there. What it needs to do now is to help to rectify that situation by allowing us to see all of this data they have accrued so we can figure out how better to fight that disinformation, to pull it down, to stop the spread of these lies that are killing people every day.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: You know, at the top of our segment, I talked about California. You know, that was a state that had made such great progress. They were really strict about those mask mandates. And just recently now, businesses, gyms, restaurants, other establishments had to ask for proof of vaccination for entry. And we're seeing now COVID cases, they are rising, hospitalizations rising. Is that a precursor, do you think, possibly, to what we're going to start seeing happening in other states?
ANAND SWAMINATHAN: It is really hard to say, because California is an example of where vaccination rates are pretty good. They have done a good job of trying to shut things down. And, yes, we're seeing some small spikes in cases, some small spikes in hospitalizations. What we are really interested to see is how this affects a population with a high vaccine rate.
Are we going to see lower death rates? Are we going to see overall lower hospitalizations, even though we're seeing a little bit of a spike up right now? And which group is that happening in? And all of that information is going to help us with directed public health interventions to push vaccines even harder. But we do need to pay attention to these trends and figure out what's going on here.
I think one of the problems is that some of the mandates, some of the restrictions have gotten a little bit more lax. And yes, while people are being required to check their vaccination status before going in, we don't have a really robust national system to verify vaccination status. And so we're leaving it on small business owners to make those decisions, which is really unfair to them. I think we have to really come up with a national plan for vaccine mandates and then a verification system to know that the people in your dining room that you're sitting with are also vaccinated.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All great points. Dr. Anand Swaminathan, thanks so much for being with us.
