COVID-19 Vaccine Strategy: Understanding Broader Impacts

ReachMD Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Darilyn Moyer, who’s the Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of the American College of Physicians. She’ll be discussing the importance of population-level modeling in shaping vaccine guidance. Here’s Dr. Moyer now.

Dr. Moyer:
In terms of taking a look at the whole landscape of future vaccine guidance, it's not simply about outcomes for that individual that you're vaccinating, and this is where it gets very complex. You've got to do the appropriate population-based modeling on children.

For example, when we started giving certain vaccines to children, we noticed there was marked diminution in some diseases in adults. Why? Because kids can be superspreaders to the adults around them for certain diseases. So, vaccine modeling takes a look not just at the individual, but all the people around them that they're in contact with who they can infect with that disease. So, that is really critical to take a look at to ensure that we have population-based vaccine models when we do make recommendations moving forward.

The other thing that's really important—we're now spending nine thousand dollars a year economically on people who have long COVID. So, what about the economic costs? Not just the financial costs, but what about the cost to society in terms of loss of productivity from their jobs? What about the loss of school days? And how could we have done better in terms of educational days for our kids? What are the lessons that we learned there for people who managed through that so we didn't have those delays? What about the horrific things that happen with mental health, particularly with our kids and our adolescents during this horrific pandemic? And then, of course, we saw huge downturns in our healthcare professionals. We saw lots of folks going to part-time work and actually leaving healthcare professions in droves, again, at a time where we can ill afford to lose those frontline healthcare professionals. So, there are so many considerations that we need to take into account when we look at the whole landscape of impact, not just the individual.

ReachMD Announcer:
That was Dr. Darilyn Moyer talking about population-level considerations in vaccine guidance. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!