Commentary
With the seasonal increase in Covid infections in the Northern United States, vaccines are important to keep the death counts down. To save lives, nothing is more critical than to ensure mass vaccination of older people who haven’t yet had Covid.
While the protection against infection and disease wanes a few months after vaccination, the protection against hospitalization and death is more durable and wanes more slowly. Hence, we should urge all older people who have not yet had Covid to get the vaccine as soon as possible. When the booster shots were approved by the FDA, we knew very little about their efficacy, but a recent observational study suggests that they reduce the risk of both infection and severe disease for those without prior infection.While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between the old and the young. In 2020, public health officials and the public discourse focused on lockdowns, such as school closures, business closures, travel restrictions and working from home mandates, while there was very little effort to better protect high-risk older people.
