Linda Brantman, a retired membership salesperson at a health club in Chicago, was paying attention last month when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the new bivalent booster that protects against two variants of Covid-19. She went online and reserved an appointment at a Walgreens near her home.
Brantman, 65, who was already vaccinated and boosted twice, has grappled with asthma on and off for years; she keeps an inhaler handy, even for an ordinary cold. If she were sick with Covid, she said, “I would definitely have breathing problems.” Within two weeks of the CDC announcement, she had received the latest booster — and public health officials hope all Americans over age 5 will also roll up their sleeves again.
But many older Americans have responded more like Alan Turner, 65, who lives in New Castle, Delaware, and recently retired from an industrial design firm. He received the initial two doses of the vaccine but stopped updating his immunity after the first recommended booster. “I’ve become such a hermit,” he said. “I have virtually no contact with people, so I haven’t gotten around to it. I don’t see any particular need. I’m biding my time.”
Although Americans over 65 remain the demographic most likely to have received the original series of vaccinations, at 92 per cent, their interest in keeping their vaccinations up to date is steadily declining, data from the CDC shows. To date, about 71 per cent have received the first recommended booster, but only about 44 per cent have received the second.
Younger people have also been less likely to receive boosters than the original vaccinations, and only about one-third of people of all ages have received any booster, The New York Times vaccine tracker indicates. But seniors, who constitute 16 per cent of the population, are more vulnerable to the virus’s effects, accounting for three-quarters of the nation’s 1.1 million deaths.
“From the beginning, older people have felt the virus was more of a threat to their safety and health and have been among the earliest adopters of the vaccine and the first round of boosters,” said Mollyann Brodie, the executive director of public opinion at Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been tracking vaccination rates and attitudes.
Now Kaiser’s most recent vaccine monitor survey, published last month, has found that only 8% of seniors said they had received the updated bivalent booster, and 37 per cent said they intended to “as soon as possible.” As a group, older adults were better informed than younger respondents, but almost 40 per cent said they had heard little or nothing about the updated bivalent vaccine, and many were unsure whether the CDC had recommended it for them.
“The messaging on boosters has been very muddled,” said Anne N Sosin, a public health researcher at the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. Partly as a result, she added, “older people are entering the winter with less protection than at earlier points in the pandemic.”
Sosin and other experts noted that older Americans have several reasons to be on guard. Their immunity from previous vaccinations and boosters may have waned; mitigation policies like mandatory masking and vaccination have largely disappeared; and public testing and vaccination sites have shut down.
Early on, Sosin said, many older adults changed their behaviour by staying at home or masking and testing when they went out. Now they face greater exposure because “they’ve resumed their pre-pandemic activities.”
“Many are no longer concerned about Covid,” she said.
Public opinion polls bear that out. Older adults may also reason that improved treatments for Covid infections make the virus less dangerous.
Yet deaths in this age group doubled from April to July, exceeding 11,000 in both July and August, largely because of the increased transmissibility of the omicron variant. Deaths began dipping again last month.
For older people, the danger of Covid is “reduced, but it’s not gone,” said William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “You can’t forget it. You can’t put it in the rearview mirror.”
Studies have shown that vaccination and boosters protect against serious illness, hospitalisation and death, although that immunity ebbs over time. “The data are rock-solid,” Schaffner said.
The Department of Health and Human Services estimated this month that among seniors and other Medicare beneficiaries, vaccination and boosters resulted in 650,000 fewer hospitalisations for Covid and had saved 300,000 lives in 2021.
But even in nursing homes, where the early months of the pandemic had a devastating toll, the booster uptake “has been very stagnant,” said Priya Chidambaram, a senior policy analyst at Kaiser Family Foundation and co-author of a survey published this month.
As of September, an average of 74 per cent of nursing home residents had received one or more boosters, but that figure ranged from 59 per cent in Arizona to 92 per cent in Vermont. Rates were far lower among nursing home staff; nationally, only about half had received a booster, and in Missouri, Alabama and Mississippi, only one-third had.
A number of public health experts are now urging a full-scale crusade — including mass-media campaigns; social media and digital communication; pop-up and drive-thru sites; mobile vans; and home visits — to raise the vaccination rate among seniors, and everyone else, before a possible winter surge of the virus.
“We have never seen an all-hands-on-deck approach to booster delivery,” Sosin said. “We should be flooding people with information, to the point where it gets irritating.” - in The New York Times.
Paula Span
The writer is a veteran journalist and former Washington Post reporter
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