Why so many people are skipping their second Covid shot - and why they shouldn't - CNN - 0 views
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When the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that almost 8% of the millions who have received the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine hadn't returned to get the second shot they need, it raised concerns that the country might not be able reach herd immunity.
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It's not unusual for people to forgo a required second shot of a vaccine, health experts say. The skip rate for the second shot of the vaccine that prevents shingles, for example, was about 26% among Medicare beneficiaries, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.
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"I am concerned about each individual who is not coming back for a second shot of course, but I actually would have thought that there would be a higher rate of people not coming back," said Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst.
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The CDC said the number of people missing doses — 5 million — may not be exact. If a person got the two doses from different reporting entities — for example, first from a state-run clinic and then from a local health clinic — the two doses may not have been linked by databases, a CDC spokeswoman said.
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Several people have reported that they got their second shot at a different place than their first, and administrators at the first site contacted them repeatedly about making an appointment for a second shot, which had already been administered elsewhere.
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When Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, got his second shot, "it was on a day that was horribly inconvenient, and I tried to move it around. They're like: You got to show up on this day at this time," he said.
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The authors analyzed results from a survey of 1,027 US adults taken between February 11 and 15 through a panel created by the National Opinion Research Center.
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Within the St. Luke's University Hospital Network in Pennsylvania, the success rate in getting people fully vaccinated is at 99%, said Dr. Jeffrey Jahre, an infectious diseases expert there, in part because the network made it easy to get the second appointment, assigning it when the first shot was given.
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The network then followed up with multiple reminders of the appointment -- five days out, three days out and then the day before -- and those who were unable to keep that appointment were "given an easy methodology of changing it," Jahre said.
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More than 43% of the US population has had at least one shot of a vaccine, and 30% are fully vaccinated,
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But another reason people may be skipping the second dose is not understanding the importance of it or being misinformed. And that may be harder to fix.
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"My sense is, a lot of this is, it's hard to get. People miss appointments, people miss doctor's appointments," Jha said on a teleconference with reporters Tuesday.
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About 20% of those surveyed believed the vaccines gave recipients strong protection after the first dose, and another 36% were unsure.Just 44% of vaccinated people reported that the vaccines conferred "strong protection" one to two weeks after the second dose, as the CDC guidelines state.
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Earlier this year, there was a public debate among health officials about delaying second doses to focus on building partial immunity to a larger swath of the population before giving everyone the second dose.
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In fact, the first dose just "primes the immune system, then the second shot sort of boosts it. This makes it a better option for obtaining immunity,"
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"There's a 36-fold difference of getting fully vaccinated versus partially," Dr. Anthony Fauci said at a news briefing Friday.
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And then there's the question of whether the country can obtain herd immunity -- meaning 70% to 85% of the population is immune -- if the number of people who don't get a second vaccine dose keeps rising.
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People also need to know, according to Wen and others, is that if you are among the 8% who have gotten only one shot of Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, it may not be too late to get that second shot.