We can’t afford to stand back in the fight against COVID   

One year ago, I sat outside my medical center, NYU Langone Health, to film the arrival of the historic COVID Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. A week later, I received the shot myself on camera. My emotions were soaring, I thought we were on the verge of emerging from the cold COVID winter.  

Unfortunately, I was wrong — but not because the vaccine doesn’t work, or because it is unsafe, or because it is experimental. In fact, it has exceeded all expectations, and is very safe.  

In the year since, the vaccine has been challenged by the sheer amount of COVID that’s spread, and variants that have increasingly eluded its response. Though it has been found to be exceptional at preventing severe disease and death, especially when given or boosted recently, it is not as good at preventing infection altogether. Of course, preventing severe infection was what it was originally designed to do.  

It is troubling that so many don’t seem to realize that the more people who take the vaccine, the better it will perform in terms of decreasing the COVID disease burden. Countries with a very high vaccination rate like Portugal, Spain, Malta and Singapore have much smaller and better contained outbreaks than we do. Hospitalizations in the U.S. and elsewhere occur primarily among the unvaccinated; sometimes I think that politics has overcome basic common sense.  

How much of an impact would it have on the public psyche if images were still being shown of oxygen tanks next to a struggling or sedated patient, or even more striking, the once-in-a-lifetime portable morgues that have otherwise only been seen in a war zone? 

As a physician who cares for patients, I do not distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated. I take care of all comers, and always have. Back in the late 1980s, I drew blood from AIDS patients in the middle of the night through scarred up veins, never once suggesting that they had gotten that way by sharing needles and somehow therefore didn’t deserve my care. Similarly now, I would never withhold care from an unvaccinated COVID patient any more than I would refuse to treat an alcoholic with cirrhosis, a smoker with lung cancer or an obese person with diabetes — or severe COVID, for that matter. 

The fact remains that the best and fastest way out of this pandemic is for everyone who is eligible to be vaccinated, and boosted if they are already vaccinated. Recovery from infection provides immunity that should be factored in too, and hybrid immunity (recovery plus at least one MRNA shot) is substantial. But the increasing rate of breakthrough re-infections for Omicron compared to Delta is another reason that those with immunity from the disease should receive a vaccine on top of it. 

Omicron appears to spread rapidly, much more so than Delta, and though data from South Africa continues to show that Omicron is leading to milder disease for the most part, the surest way to guarantee a mild case is to be vaccinated. Most of the hospitalizations in South Africa are among the unvaccinated, and that is likely to be true with Omicron for the rest of the world. The vaccines have been found to be less effective against Omicron, at least in terms of antibodies if not T cells, which is why most who are eligible should be boosted. The more immunity we have the better. Omicron may spread more easily than Delta in part because of its high re-infection rate and partial resistance to the vaccines.  
 
Yesterday a teen told me that his New York City high school, which has been a bastion of precautions throughout the pandemic, is now dialing back on masks and mitigation during many activities, especially outdoors, as well as automatic testing for all who have been exposed. He said that the HEPA filters have been turned off in many classrooms because they were so noisy, and people were constantly banging into them.  

I wondered why the relaxation of regulations at a time when the country is still in big trouble from Delta and Omicron is just beginning its march, when New York is amping up its mask regulations. At first I thought the school was suffering from COVID fatigue, as so many are, rebelling against restrictions. But then I remembered that almost everyone at this particular school, student and teacher alike, is fully vaccinated and boosted. 

Let’s build bridges across the cultural divide, provide more incentives rather than mandates to get everyone vaccinated, and end the pandemic in the U.S. and around the world. This virus is with us to stay, but we can get much better control over it if we all work together as one large community. It’s actually that simple. 

Marc Siegel, M.D., is a professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health. He is a Fox News medical correspondent and author of the new book, “COVID; the Politics of Fear and the Power of Science.”