Help ease the crisis – get a booster

Chief Medical Officer of Cape Cod Healthcare, William Agel, MD, MPH, is on a mission to boost COVID-19 booster shots and reduce the inpatient numbers at Cape hospitals.

“New research indicates COVID-19 booster shots would have a major impact on reducing hospitalizations and life-threatening illness,” Dr. Agel recently wrote in a message to CCHC staff.

About 75 percent of Americans have received at least one COVID-19 dose, but only about 30 percent are fully vaccinated, including a booster, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. About 88 percent of Americans over 65 have received the first two doses, but only 60 percent have gotten the booster, according to the Commonwealth Fund, which supports health research. A report by the fund estimates that tripling the pace of booster shots could prevent more than 63,000 deaths and almost 600,000 hospitalizations by May 1; doubling it could prevent 41,000 deaths and more than 400,000 hospitalizations.

By promoting full vaccination and booster shots, Dr. Agel hopes to protect the community and ease hospitalizations on Cape Cod.

“Reducing COVID-19 patient admissions would provide much-needed relief to our hospitals and staff, who have been on the front lines day in and day out as the wave of the Omicron variant has progressed. … [They] have witnessed first-hand the serious impact to individuals and their families,” he wrote.

Cape Cod Hospital Hospitalist Mary-Amanda O’Neill, MD has certainly felt the impact of the increased caseload. As of mid-January, Cape Cod Healthcare had the highest-ever COVID-related admissions, including 62 COVID patients at Cape Cod Hospital with six in the ICU.

“What folks may not appreciate is that COVID is highly variable and can take someone in the prime of their health and render them incapacitated for a period of time,” she said. “It’s not like a bacterial infection where you can just find the laser-targeted culture and sensitivity, give the person that exact medication, and it will be gone. It’s a frustrating, difficult process.”

Dr. O’Neill, who got her degree in Chemical Engineering and Biosciences, before going to medical school, said experience has taught her the safety and value of vaccines. One of her first jobs was working on a project developing a purer and safer smallpox vaccine for the U.S. military in the wake of bioterrorism threats after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Researchers developed the vaccine and got it approved within three years, as opposed to the usual seven to 10. It was the first fast-tracked vaccine, she said. It gave her faith in the stringency of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine-approval process.

“The FDA takes their mission to never approve anything that would be unsafe for the American public very seriously,” she said. “They come into the facility unannounced. They are grim-faced. They have the power to lock the doors and send everyone home if they concerned about quality control. Everyone stops what they are doing, and you have to be able to answer questions about every single thing that has happened during the drug development process.”

The fast-tracking of the smallpox vaccine was a model for developing the COVID-19 vaccines, she said. “It was setting the stage for a what-if scenario. If there were another global pandemic, how could corporations respond more quickly?”

Later, during medical training at Albany Medical College in NY, Dr. O’Neill treated Amish patients, from communities where many people rejected vaccination, including for childhood diseases like tetanus and diphtheria.

“We forget about the danger of things that we are casually vaccinated against when we’re children, and how it can wreak havoc on families and communities,” she said. “There is nothing sadder than seeing a whole waiting room of Amish people praying over their small kids, and knowing that if they had been vaccinated, it wouldn’t have been necessary.”

These days, Dr. O’Neill often talks with Cape Cod Hospital patients about vaccinations and booster shots.

“So, I hate to say it, but the conversations in the hospital had been more driven by regret and remorse and fear,” she said. “But those are very powerful emotions, and they do drive people to change their minds. And then we have them calling families and saying, ‘Forget what we said before. Please get vaccinated.’"