Maybe things are, I think, going to be much better.
Suddenly, we are standing on the platform to get vaccines for COVID-19 into our offices. The epidemic seems to have started a lifetime ago, but it has been a little over a year. And it seems just yesterday (and also forever back) that we got vaccines first.
On December 11, 2020, “the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued the first emergency use authority (EUA) for a vaccine for the prevention of coronavirus infection 2019 (COVID-19) caused by acute respiratory respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS- CoV- 2) in individuals 16 years of age and older. ” (From news on the FDA website)
Since the first vaccines were approved for emergency use in our country, it has become a major challenge and the sometimes inevitable burden of getting the vaccines for our patients. Vaccination sites were those big places far away, with a ton of rules and restrictions. Our patients were wondering why they couldn’t stop by our office, or even just walk into those sites.
To order a vaccine, patients need access to a smartphone or computer, and even so, they have to click and click and click. Sites keep going down, and seemingly insignificant vaccination time periods are suddenly one minute away.
There has been a lot of confusion about who is eligible for when, and what needs to happen in order for you to get your vaccine. Do you need a letter from your doctor, or not? Does my mourning deserve it? What the heck is self-witness? At every step of the way there seem to be more and more obstacles for patients to resist, things that made it bigger and harder to get vaccines in people’s arms. who needed it.
But all of a sudden, there seems to be a moment of potential and a feeling that things are going to get a lot better. By getting vaccines in our offices, as well as in neighborhood pharmacies, we will go a long way towards ensuring that everyone has access to the vaccine that is available. request.
Some have been holding out for the next statements, put off by new vaccine technology despite the assurances we were able to gather. And many have been waiting for the one-dose version, which could also improve accessibility and improve completion rates. But over the next few weeks, we are going to start having these vaccines in our office, most likely for patients who already have a scheduled appointment. At the same time, we are at the same time setting up other sites nearby, where patients who do not have scheduled orders for an office visit will also receive a dose.
If you think about it, the processes by which we started the vaccination looked a bit inaccessible, putting a lot more pressure on the system to get everything right. But when the patient receives a vaccine for COVID-19 as easy as walking into a corner drug store, or occurring while also at a doctor’s visit, this should be normalized and make it a far more reasonable thing to do, more than a normal part of the everyday health care landscape. I can only hope that this is just the beginning of making the COVID-19 vaccines a routine part of our healthcare, as common as getting your blood pressure checked, getting your labs for your cholesterol, getting your mammogram, or getting your flu.
The success of allowing science to create this vaccine and deliver public health infrastructure has gone a long way in ensuring that our society survives during this time. Delivered in routine office visits and other situations without much rigmarole, we hope it will help remove some of the politics that came with this virus, this vaccine, and the this pandemic.
We’re not out of the woods yet; we still have to deal with a huge burden of issues, as well as the dangers of building restrictions across the country. And the potentially more contagious and lethal variables become largely unknown by measuring what lies ahead.
We have to keep up with everything else – the masks, the hand washing, the social distance, and the common sense that has made us so far. And we still don’t know how long immunity lasts, and whether those who are vaccinated can spread the disease, but we hope for those answers to come.
For now, I’m just happy, starting in – hopefully – just a few days, we will be able, at the end of your office visit, to place orders for routine blood tests, EKG, her bone density test, and the COVID-19 vaccine. And it seems like it’s normal, just a regular part of your trip to the doctor, there’s nothing special or magical going on here.
When of course it is.
Fred N. Pelzman, MD, of Weill Cornell Internal Medicine Associates and weekly blogger for MedPage today, following what is going on in the world of primary care medicine from the perspective of its own practice.