UrbanUpdate

This time last year, the Omicron variant of COVID-19 had not yet been detected.  By mid-January, it had overtaken other coronavirus variants, pushing new cases above 800,000 per day—eight times the daily numbers recorded in December. Almost as many people were dying each day as at any other point in the pandemic. Last winter was terrible.

This time around a pair of new vaccines, the updated or “bivalent”  boosters from Pfizer and Moderna, could curb another winter spike. They’re both FDA-approved, and they both are designed to protect against the latest omicron sub-variants. They're available near you right now, and if you're in the U.S., you're almost certainly eligible to get one. And, “They are probably our best hope of avoiding severe illness, hospitalization and potentially long COVID as we head into the cooler months,” says Dr. Seth Cohen, medical director of Infection Prevention at University of Washington Medical Center.

With widespread use of these boosters, we could potentially skip infection spikes, hospital visits, and pandemic backsliding this winter, when it seems likely enough that cases will surge again. Unfortunately, barely anyone has taken the booster. More than a month has passed since the FDA approved them and they became available, yet only 11 million people have received a bivalent booster. For context, the initial roll out of COVID-19 vaccines saw more than 4 million people receive shots on some days. “It’s unfortunate," says Dr. Cohen, "and understandably reflects people's desires to not think about COVID-19 anymore and hope it’ll go away.” 

The list of requirements to receive the booster doesn’t explain the small number of people who’ve received them, because the list is very short. Beyond waiting two months since a previous vaccine or booster, Moderna only requires its recipients to be aged 18 or older. With Pfizer, anyone older than 12 can get the booster. (You'll also want to wait two months or so after a real-deal COVID infection.) 

Ambivalence towards vaccines doesn’t explain the low booster rate, either. According to the Morning Consult, a market research company, vaccine skepticism has dropped considerably since the first vaccines arrived. Among 18-34 year olds, the most vaccine-wary age demographic, the percentage uncertain or unwilling to vaccine dropped from 53 percent to 36 percent between March of 2021 and September of 2022.

Instead, it seems everyone is just waiting for this movie to end and screen to go black—and the damned credits just won’t roll. Hundreds of millions of Americans have received vaccines, and tens of millions have received a booster—many with the expectation that those acts alone would be enough to put a cap on the pandemic era.

A poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that around half of respondents had heard little or nothing about the new boosters. Only around one-third of them said they’d received the new booster or planned to. It’s not just that the conversation contains contradictions, it’s that the conversation isn’t even reaching people. “I’m immersed in this stuff, but if that wasn’t the case I think I maybe would have heard one Spotify ad about getting a booster,” says Dr. Sanjana Ravi, a senior analyst at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

So we’re here to say: Please just get the thing. More than 8,000 people died of COVID-19 in September. And with a temperature dip the stakes rise. An increase in transmission amongst people who aren’t protected with a booster could threaten to further strain the healthcare system.

“In the hospital I’m still seeing many people admitted who developed severe COVID, and they're preventable,” says Dr. Cohen. “I want to be really clear that the biggest value of these boosters is really in preventing hospitalization, severe disease and death.”

But a booster will also almost certainly protect you as well. Even “mild” cases of COVID can be quite unpleasant, and getting the shot could be the difference between avoiding infection and spending an achy couple of days on the couch.

Also: just go ahead and get it ASAP. In anticipation of my own holiday plans, I asked Dr. Cohen about waiting to get the booster until, say, early December. After all, wouldn’t a more recent shot offer the greatest protection? 

“I would want to be vaccinated before any potential risk period occurs rather than waiting until the last minute,” he told me. “It’s sort of like timing the stock market—which none of us should try to do.”

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