On the menu today: Compared to the usual settings of panic or ignoring a topic completely, the media coverage of this winter’s “tripledemic” of Covid, flu, and RSV seems actually just about right. Lots of Americans are getting sick, and it’s a pain, with plenty of places experiencing brief shortages of over-the-counter cold and fever medications, but this isn’t the Covid pandemic all over again and it isn’t a national emergency. Moderna, GSK, and Pfizer are rolling out vaccines for RSV, and we may find that getting vulnerable populations vaccinated runs a lot smoother when governments and employers aren’t trying to force vaccines into the arms of people who don’t want them.
Trudging Our Way through the Winter Tripledemic
We’re well into winter, and the ongoing “tripledemic” — covid, flu, and RSV — is the sort of news story that may seem very big and consequential, or small and inconsequential, depending on your personal circumstances and how well those around you are faring.
A lot of people have gotten sick this winter. Flu season started early, but it’s already starting to decline in most areas, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reported Covid cases are up a bit, but nowhere near the numbers seen during the winters of 2020 and 2021; in fact, Covid cases are actually lower now than in the summer of 2022. Cases of RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) appear to have peaked in late November, though numbers are still fairly high.
Your local drugstore may be placing purchase limits on certain items in the cough and cold section, or you may find the shelves in that section bare. There is some good news on this front, as Walgreens announced Monday that, “due to the improved in-stock conditions of over-the-counter pediatric fever-reducing products, we have removed the online only purchase limit. This was originally put in place to prevent excess purchasing behavior.”
As this newsletter noted at the beginning of winter, RSV is characterized by the CDC as “a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms. Most people recover in a week or two, but RSV can be serious, especially for infants and older adults.” Like a lot of other viruses, RSV is more dangerous to the very young, the very old, and the immunocompromised than to the average person. One theory for this year’s higher rates of all kinds of infections is that we spent almost two years taking all those precautions against Covid-19, which meant that our bodies encountered fewer viruses of any kind, so they’re out of practice at fighting off viruses.
A lot of the big pharmaceutical companies that jumped into action in 2020 to develop Covid vaccines turned their attention to creating RSV vaccines.
Yesterday, Moderna “reported that its vaccine was 83.7 percent effective against RSV-associated lower respiratory tract disease (LRTD) as defined by two or more symptoms among trial participants that were at least 60 years old. The phase 3 trial recruited roughly 37,000 adults across 22 countries.” As a result, “both GSK [formerly GlaxoSmithKline] and Pfizer have already filed for approval with the FDA to prevent lower respiratory tract disease caused by RSV in people 60 years and older. Both were granted priority reviews, with a decision date slated for May.”
The RSV-vaccination effort will not be a direct sequel to the heated public battles over the Covid vaccine. Because RSV is primarily a threat to particular demographics, doctors and public-health officials will likely encourage those demographics to get the shot. It’s hard to envision any employer or government agency issuing mandates or firing those who refuse to take an RSV vaccine.
The mandate fights over the Covid vaccines may well have done significant damage to public faith in vaccines in general. As for the Covid boosters, the public’s interest appears to be rapidly dwindling. From here on out, updated Covid boosters will cost you, or your insurance company, about $110 to $130 per dose. The number of Americans who got the Omicron-focused booster was dramatically lower than in previous rounds of Covid vaccinations — and that’s for a shot with no cost to the person getting it or to that person’s insurance company. My guess is that even fewer Americans will be interested in boosters once there’s a price tag attached.
But there is some contrasting news. Flu vaccinations are up this year, according to the CDC: “National coverage for all adults, including Puerto Rico, is 4.1 percentage points higher this season compared with the same time last season (39.8 percent compared with 35.7 percent).” In a survey conducted from December 15 to December 25, 45.2 percent of adults said they had already gotten a flu vaccine, and 17.1 percent said they probably or definitely will receive a vaccine this year.
I’m pro-vaccination, but I’ve also called out those who exaggerated the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines, from President Joe Biden, who declared, “How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anyone else,” to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who asserted, “The virus stops with every vaccinated person. . . . It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to get more people.” I’ve called out public-health officials for refusing to object to those statements, and CDC director Rochelle Walensky for refusing every possible opportunity to correct Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s nonsense claim that more than 100,000 American children were in serious condition, and many on ventilators, because of Covid-19.
With very few exceptions, public-health experts acted as if telling a lie that might encourage vaccination or make Covid sound even scarier than it is represents some sort of virtue.
A few days ago, medical student Kevin Bass observed that Twitter’s discussion of Covid has separated into two diametrically opposed positions: “1. Every heart condition, ever, is due to the vaccine. Vax is going to kill everyone. 2. We must be vaccinated every 3 mos, w/ N95 masks + Chinese-style lockdowns. To do otherwise is anti-science + eugenics. Everyone I know has long COVID.”
As they say, it’s funny because it’s true.
There are some Americans who can’t wait to restart the mask fights of the past few years. A group of Los Angeles Unified School District parents wants the schools to bring back mask mandates. The fact that the district “strongly encourages” wearing masks, and that their own kids do, isn’t sufficient, they contend.
Public health is trickier than it looked from the campaign trail of 2020, when Biden pledged he was going to “shut down the virus.” For a brief period in May 2022, the public discussion of monkeypox made it sound like the sequel to Covid, with the president unhelpfully warning that monkeypox is something “that everybody should be concerned about,” even though it was spread only by close skin-to-skin contact and in the overwhelming majority of cases among gay men — or to use the public-health community’s preferred locution, “men who have sex with men.” By August, the Biden administration was getting lambasted for “poor communication [on monkeypox], tons of paperwork, slow-moving bureaucracy, confusing and contradictory regulations, mandatory inspections, and glacially paced approval processes delaying the distribution of key vaccines” — which was more or less how the U.S. government had responded to Covid-19.
You notice the recurring theme of President Biden not knowing what he’s talking about and making things worse.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, no, pollsters, it is not surprising that Republicans who like Elon Musk are not all that interested in buying a Tesla. And elsewhere, the unwillingness or inability to keep and release visitors’ logs to Biden’s private houses demonstrates the shell game that he and his team are playing on transparency. “During his presidency, Biden has spent all or part of 194 days either in Wilmington or at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, according to a tally by the Associated Press. That’s about six and a half months out of a presidency that has yet to hit two full years.”