Why You Should Get Your Covid Shots Every Year

It’s pretty normal to shove a trauma to the back of your mind, to bury it, or even to re-conceptualize it as “not so bad”. When I go back and read my journal entries from the early covid days, I realize how successful I’ve been at compartmentalizing.

We lost well over a million Americans to covid and tens of thousands died indirectly from things like the strain on the healthcare system. It was for a while one of the leading causes of death in the US. Millions of kids lost valuable school time as we tried to figure out how to fight the pandemic. The impacts will be felt for years.

In fact, the pandemic as such isn’t really over. Millions suffer from after effects of the infection (currently called “post-covid syndrome”) which we still don’t understand very well. And covid is still out there. It doesn’t really have any clear seasonal variation like flu. It seems to come and go in waves. And while things are much, much better now, covid is still having a substantial impact. For many it’s just a cold, but we are still losing tens of thousands of people to covid each year in the US.

Most severe illness is seen in people over 65 who haven’t kept up to date with their shots. Staying up to date on covid shots is very, very effective at keeping you out of the hospital, the ICU, or the morgue. And because immunity wanes over time due to changes in the virus and due to natural loss of immunity, the shots you got, say, two years ago provide very little protection. This is why we currently recommend that ALL people stay up to date on covid shots.

This official recommendation is, however, likely to change shortly. Our usual panels of experts and our established protocols for recommending vaccines has been torn up, and antivaccine activists have been put in charge of the process. Instead of vaccines going through the usual process of investigation and approval through the proper FDA and CDC committees, these activists are making the decisions unilaterally. They announced via an opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine and various press releases that the fall covid vaccine will only be approved for the highest risk Americans. If you don’t fall into the group they’ve defined, it will be very hard to get vaccinated.

They don’t base this on scientific evidence or expert opinion—they have intentionally cut the experts out of the process. They instead base it on their own incorrect ideology-driven ideas. One of the key roadblocks they’ve thrown up is actually quite scary. They are requiring “placebo-controlled trials” of the shots, which is problematic for a couple of reasons.

First, this is not how we deal with vaccines for rapidly mutating viruses. For decades, for the flu shot (and a couple of years for the covid shot) we have allowed these necessary “tweaks” to the vaccine to go ahead so that we have a shot ready in a timely manner when new strains emerge. The shot is basically the same, but with small modifications to match the changes in the virus. This has been done safely and effectively for years. To require each little change to undergo the same trials a wholly new vaccine would need is neither necessary nor smart. It will delay needed vaccines so long as to be nearly useless.

The other big problem here is the idea of a “placebo-controlled trial”. When we do drug trials, the ideal is to a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial. Basically, you take the participants and randomly assign them to receive either the drug or a placebo such as saline. Neither the subjects nor the scientists know who is receiving which until the study is over.

This is not always the ideal approach however. For example, when studying a new cancer drug, we don’t normally give patients a placebo alone—we normally test the new drug against the current best treatment. To do otherwise would be horribly unethical.

When testing a new vaccine, we have the same problem. If we compare a new vaccine to a saline shot, we would be depriving test participants the current shots. While the older version may not be as effective (why else would we look for a new one!), it does provide protection against a potentially deadly disease.

The people currently in charge of our government health institutions are incompetent, ideology-driven hacks. This is not my opinion alone but that of most of the nation’s experts.

Once again, I’d urge you to contact your representatives. Demand that they make covid shots available to all in a timely manner. Demand that the follow the advice of the real experts.

Stay well.

-pal