Itemoids ★ Didier Viodé

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 09 › fall-covid-vaccines-boosters › 675313

This story seems to be about:

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Yesterday, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that everyone above the age of six months should get a dose of the new, updated COVID-19 vaccine that the FDA just green-lighted. To learn more about the vaccine, and for guidance on how to approach COVID as cases rise, I called Katherine J. Wu, an Atlantic staff writer who covers science.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Stress drinking has a gender divide. The conservative censorship campaign reaches its natural conclusion. Kevin McCarthy is a hostage.

For Everyone

Lora Kelley: Why is the CDC recommending that everyone get a COVID vaccine this fall?

Katherine J. Wu: Experts at yesterday’s CDC advisory panel were really making it clear that everyone stands to benefit in some way from this vaccine. COVID is very much still a real threat. People are still dying, and people are still being debilitated by long COVID. Even if risk is not equal across everyone in the population, this is a really important public-health intervention.

It’s also important to keep in mind the historical and cultural context here. Last year, uptake for the fall COVID vaccine was abysmal; less than 20 percent of people got it even though it was also widely recommended. And certainly, with uptake that low, the goal will be to raise uptake this year.

Lora: How does this shot differ from previous COVID shots and boosters?

Katherine: I would argue that this is not a booster. This is another move toward routinizing COVID-19 vaccines to be like the annual flu vaccine, a shot that is given to much of the population every fall in advance of respiratory-virus season. With the flu vaccine, there’s an expectation that the composition of the vaccine is going to change with some regularity: The main variants or strains the vaccines are targeting may change.

This COVID shot is different from last year’s: It no longer contains any ingredients targeting the original coronavirus variants that were in the very first vaccines that we got in 2020 and 2021. It targets just the XBB subvariants of Omicron.

Lora: In your article today, you wrote about an expert who believes vaccine recommendations should prioritize only vulnerable groups. What is motivating some experts not to offer full-throated endorsements of everyone getting a vaccine this fall?

Katherine: To be clear, there is really widespread consensus that everyone needs at least a couple doses of the vaccine. There’s no doubt in experts’ minds that going from zero vaccines to two or three is essential. The gains are going to be massive for everyone.

The disagreement here is not necessarily about the facts—it’s more about how they should be framed. There’s widespread consensus that certain groups are at higher risk than others, including people who are older, immunocompromised, pregnant, living with chronic health conditions, and living in congregate settings, to name a few. The question then is: Should we target the recommendations only to these groups, to really make sure that they are the ones going out to get this vaccine with no hesitation?

There is worry among some experts that the universal recommendation does not adequately focus vaccination efforts on the people who most need it. And some experts feel that young, healthy people, who are at a lower risk of bad COVID outcomes, may be set with the vaccines that they’ve already got.

Lora: How would you recommend that people who aren’t in those high-risk categories approach vaccines this fall?

Katherine: I am all for enthusiastically recommending this vaccine to everyone. Some people are at higher risk, so I would even more strongly encourage those people to go get it.

When we think about any vaccine, especially COVID-19 vaccines, we think most about preventing severe disease. But there are secondary benefits of these vaccines too: For at least a time, you will have a lower risk of getting infected and spreading the virus. And if you do get sick, your symptoms may be shorter if you’ve been recently vaccinated. There may even be a lower risk of developing long COVID down the road, which is an important thing to keep in mind because we know that it can come out of even mild infections. Also, there’s really not a concern at this point of the vaccine running out.

Lora: When should people get this vaccine?

Katherine: There are a few things to keep in mind on timing: If you are lower risk, there is relatively less rush to get the shot. That said, COVID cases have been rising for weeks now. So I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone to not get a shot anytime soon.

The one exception is if you’ve recently been infected. If you have had COVID recently: First, I’m sorry. Second, there are a lot of immunologists who would argue it’s not a terrible idea to wait maybe two or three months after your infection before getting a shot, because you probably have some lingering immunity left behind from that infection. (Huge caveat here: This is not an endorsement of infection, but just a matter of fact.) You don’t want to hamper the ability of your body to form a good immune response to the vaccine if you get it too close to infection.

You totally can get the COVID shot at the same time as the flu shot. It’s convenient, and you only have to deal with possible side effects once.

Lora: What precautions can people take this fall, beyond just getting vaccinated?

Katherine: I am definitely getting a vaccine this fall. But a vaccine is not a silver bullet. It’s going to work best against severe disease, but the protections against infection and transmission are more porous and more temporary. So when I go into crowded settings, when I travel on planes, when I see people in my life who are more vulnerable than I am, I am going to be testing and masking.

We’ve already seen that cases have been rising even at the tail end of summer, which is atypical for most respiratory viruses. That’s another reminder that COVID has not yet settled into a super predictable pattern. I don’t want to hide in my house forever. I want to be able to enjoy the company of others. But I see vaccines, testing, and masking as tools that enable me to interact more safely in those settings.

Evening Read

Didier Viodé

I Never Called Her Momma

By Jenisha Watts

Ms. Brown didn’t tell me where we were going. I knew we would be visiting someone important, a literary figure, because we took a gypsy cab instead of the subway. It would probably be someone I should have known, but didn’t.

A brownstone in Harlem. It was immaculate—paintings of women in headscarves; a cherry-colored oriental rug; a dark, gleaming dining-room table. Ms. Brown led me toward a woman on the couch. She knew that I would recognize her, and I did, despite the plastic tube snaking from her nostrils to an oxygen tank. Maya Angelou’s back was straight. Her rose-pink eyeshadow sparkled.

My mind called up random bits of information from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Canned pineapples—she loved them. Bailey—her brother’s name. What she felt when she heard someone read Dickens aloud for the first time—the voice that “slid in and curved down through and over the words.” And that, like me, she had called her grandmother Momma.

Read our October cover story.