Hawaii prepares to offer booster shots

Recall shots aimed at increasing resistance to COVID-19[female[feminine were due to start as early as next week, but state health officials are still waiting for federal agencies to give final approval to the shots and provide advice on how to administer them, leaving future residents in the near future. limbo.

A third dose of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines was to be available to residents from the week of September 20 if eight months had passed since their second dose. This would apply to about 17,000 Hawaii residents, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ultimately, the state is expected to distribute additional vaccines over the next few months to more than a million residents who have been vaccinated this year. People receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was administered from March, should also be eligible for another dose.

But President Joe Biden’s announcement last month regarding the booster shots was conditional on approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is still pending and hotly debated among scientists. .

On Monday, an international group of scientists, including some from the FDA, released a review who concluded that the available data on coronavirus vaccines do not yet provide credible evidence to support recalls for the general population.

The article, published in The Lancet, said that booster injections may eventually be needed in the general population due to waning immunity or new variants of the virus, but warned that there could be risks to health if reminders are introduced too early or too frequently.

The authors of the article included two scientists from the FDA who announced last month that they were leaving the agency, in part because they disagreed with Biden’s push for boosters before their agency can review the evidence and make recommendations, according to national media.

Biden’s announcement was also controversial as much of the world’s population still hasn’t had access to life-saving vaccines, while the US supply is robust.

An FDA committee is expected to meet on Friday to assess the booster injections. Typically, a CDC advisory committee then makes recommendations, according to local health officials.

The dust has left the state’s health ministry unsure of what to prepare for. For example, officials are uncertain whether the FDA will approve the same eight-month interval between the second and third shot that Biden previously announced, said Brooks Baehr, a spokesperson for the Department of Health.

“We also don’t know if, for example, the CDC can recommend booster shots for certain age groups before others. There are a lot of unknowns and that’s why we have to wait, ”Baehr said by email.

As the state embarked on a major effort to set up statewide vaccination sites when vaccines first became available and were in high demand, Baehr said the state did not plan to have to restart. There are now more than 230 sites statewide offering the vaccines, as well as more than 200 pop-up immunization events scheduled for September.

The state also does not anticipate having to deal with a limited supply of vaccines, such as at the start of the deployment when the size of the shipments was closely monitored.

As of Tuesday, Baehr said, the state had 188,000 doses of the vaccine, which does not include doses provided by federal agencies. The state has the capacity to administer more than 60,000 doses per week without opening additional vaccination sites.

Hospital officials are also preparing to offer booster shots, but they too are awaiting federal guidance.

Hawaii Pacific Health is set to immediately make booster vaccines available at its on-site vaccination clinics at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women & Children in Oahu and Wilcox Medical Center in Kauai, as well as at its mobile vaccination clinics, said Kristen Bonilla, spokesperson for the hospital system. She said Hawaii Pacific Health may also open additional vaccination sites.

Starting last month, the state administered a third dose of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines to residents who are immunocompromised and whose bodies may not have developed an adequate immune response to the virus.

So far, 10,790 residents have received a third dose of one of the vaccines, according to the state The data.

The administration of a new layer to the state’s immunization program comes as local health authorities continue to grapple with a significant increase in COVID-19 cases resulting from the highly contagious delta variant. Over the past two months, they have had to scramble to set up more testing sites, find additional medical oxygen supplies, import more than 600 nurses and other health professionals, and set up triage centers. .

While the rapid increase in cases appears to have plateaued, health officials warn that the number of cases and the number of hospitalizations in Hawaii are still too high. On Tuesday, the Department of Health reported 423 new coronavirus infections, including 338 new cases in Oahu, 23 in Maui, 41 on the island of Hawaii, 14 in Kauai, five in Molokai and two Hawaii residents diagnosed in out of state. Hospitalizations edged down to 357, according to state data.