Tag: Kavita

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Dr. Kavita Patel says want for a Covid booster shot appears inevitable

Dr. Kavita Patel says need for a Covid booster shot seems inevitable

Former Obama administration official Dr. Kavita Patel told CNBC on Monday that she expected a Covid vaccine booster to eventually be approved by U.S. regulators due to new, more transmissible variants of coronavirus.

“With the threat of the Delta variant and possibly other looming variants in the future, it seems inevitable that we will need a booster shot,” Patel said on Squawk Box. “But that trillion dollar question is when? It seems like six months is early.”

The comments from Patel, who now works as a family doctor in Washington, came before Pfizer representatives met with federal health officials on Monday to discuss the possible need for Covid booster vaccinations.

Pfizer recently said it is developing a booster shot to combat the highly transmissible Delta variant. In that announcement, the drug maker cited internal data and a study in Israel showing that six months after vaccination, people experience decreased immunity from Pfizer’s two-dose vaccine as Delta becomes the predominant variant in the country.

The company said a third dose of its existing vaccine could help boost immunity. Over the past few months, executives at Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have said that people will likely need a third dose of vaccine within a year of being fully vaccinated.

However, shortly after Pfizer’s announcement last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration released a joint statement stating that fully vaccinated Americans do not currently need a booster vaccination.

This view is supported by health experts like Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, shared. Jha told CNBC on Friday that he had “seen no evidence yet that anyone needs a third shot”.

While Patel said the data suggests that all three of the Covid vaccines currently approved in the US – the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine – offer “more than enough immunity” To protect against severe hospitalization and death, Pfizer did not criticize Pfizer for working on the booster intake.

“I think what we do know is that, even six months ago, immunity declines over time. The question is, how long? ”Said Patel, who served as policy director for the Bureau of Interstate Affairs and Public Engagement in the Obama administration.

People shouldn’t get a third vaccination now, Patel warned.

“We have seen patients who did this accidentally or even deliberately, and they had even more dramatic side effects than the second shot, so I wouldn’t encourage anyone,” said Patel.

Finally, if a booster is recommended by regulators, people should expect the CDC to make recommendations for specific populations, similar to what happened when the vaccine was initially introduced with a focus on high-risk groups. “It won’t come one, it will all,” she said.

Patel said the conversation about booster shots in the US must take into account the global impact, given the difficult introduction in other parts of the world.

“It won’t help the United States if the rest of the world stays unvaccinated and they have the opportunity to get hundreds of millions of doses because we got a booster,” said Patel.

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Pausing J&J Covid vaccine may have far reaching results: Dr. Kavita Patel

U.S. states face steep decline in J&J vaccine

Dr. Kavita Patel told CNBC on Tuesday that she believes the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation that states stop using Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot Covid vaccine is likely to have a lasting impact on the country’s efforts to fight the pandemic.

“This is a devastating blow to this J&J vaccination effort in the US,” said Patel, a family doctor in Washington, DC, in an interview on Squawk Box. She also worked on health initiatives in the Obama administration while serving as director of policy for the Bureau of Interstate Affairs and Public Engagement.

Patel said the supply of Pfizer and Moderna’s two-shot vaccines will not be able to quickly meet the demand caused by the J&J hiatus. This will delay US vaccination efforts, she added.

The FDA recommendation, released Tuesday, came after six people in the US experienced rare and severe blood clotting problems after receiving the J&J vaccine.

In a tweet, the US regulator said its actions were taken “out of caution”.

All six cases occurred in women between the ages of 18 and 48, with symptoms developing six to 13 days after receiving the shot.

So far, J&J has said that there is “no clear causal link” between these rare events and the vaccine. The US drug giant also said it was working with regulators.

While she anticipates that Moderna and Pfizer will at some point be able to “fill some of that void,” said Patel, “it will be some time” before these other vaccine manufacturers have additional doses available in the US

A particular challenge in discontinuing the administration of J & J’s vaccine is that it only requires a single shot, while Moderna and Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines require two doses for complete protection of immunity.

“We just can’t replace it for the next week or three,” said Patel, a medical assistant for NBC News and a non-resident of the Brookings Institution. “This will delay our vaccination efforts.”

To compensate for this, the US could consider reducing second-dose administration to recipients of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, Patel suggested.

The Chief Medical Officer of the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has spoken out against requests earlier in the pandemic.

The second dose of Moderna is supposed to be given four weeks after the first, while Pfizer is three weeks apart.

“You will hear a renewal for calls to delay that second shot so we can get that many first shots in the arms. It’s not an unreasonable thing to think about now,” said Patel.

“If we postpone the second dose of Moderna or Pfizer for a week or two, it might actually help us fill some of that void faster,” she added.

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Dr. Kavita Patel predicts July Fourth will mark a Covid ‘turning level’

Dr. Kavita Patel predicts July Fourth will mark a Covid ‘turning point’

Dr. Kavita Patel predicted that July 4th will mark “a turning point or turning point” in the fight against Covid for the United States.

“If we can achieve this herd immunity … we will be able to suppress the activity of this virus to the levels we see in the influenza virus,” Patel told CNBC’s The News with Shepard Smith on Thursday evening. “We can wholeheartedly expect to move from a pandemic and some sort of global emergency to an endemic where this is only a regular part of our dealings,” added the former Obama administration adviser.

While her prediction was in line with President Joe Biden’s goal of bringing the nation to a semblance of normalcy by Independence Day, she noted that regular boosters or Covid vaccines will likely be necessary in the future, especially if communicable variants become common spread.

Pfizer released new data from Israel indicating its two-shot vaccine is 97% effective in preventing symptomatic Covid cases and 94% effective against asymptomatic cases. The analysis also showed a high level of protection against the highly transferable variant B.1.1.7 from Great Britain, which has also spread in the USA

By Friday morning, 1 in 10 Americans had been fully vaccinated – and in total, more than 98 million doses had been administered nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency also reported that 62% of Americans 65 and older received at least one dose, and nearly a third of them were fully vaccinated.

Patel believes the Food and Drug Administration will “soon” fully approve Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Moderna vaccines, especially as more data accumulates. All there were released in the US for emergencies.

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What you possibly can and may’t do after getting the Covid vaccine, in response to Dr. Kavita Patel

What you can and can't do after getting the Covid vaccine, according to Dr. Kavita Patel

Even after being fully vaccinated against Covid, some public health precautions will still be needed before further data can be collected on the vaccines, said Dr. Kavita Patel told CNBC on Friday.

It is clear that Pfizer and Moderna’s two-shot vaccines are highly effective in preventing serious illness and death from Covid-19, Patel said in a “Squawk Box” interview. Currently, it is less known how well the vaccines reduce coronavirus transmission.

In other words, someone who has been vaccinated has greatly reduced their risk of actually getting the coronavirus, but Patel claims that precautions will still be needed in the coming months when a small group gathers and one person in this one Group was not vaccinated.

“When you are in a household with young children [who don’t yet qualify for the vaccine] or even children at increased risk … or even yourself, if you are at increased risk despite being vaccinated, you should take precautions indoors while wearing masks. If possible, stay outdoors with people, ”said Patel, a Washington, DC family doctor and non-resident of the Brookings Institution.

“The only reason I’m saying this is that we need more data to understand the risk of transmission,” she added.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week updated their quarantine guidelines for people who have been fully vaccinated. Both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines require two doses for complete protection. The CDC now says people exposed to the coronavirus won’t need quarantine within three months of being fully vaccinated if they don’t develop symptoms.

Like Patel, the CDC recognizes that the risk of one vaccinated person passing the virus on to another is “uncertain”. The reason for the modified quarantine policy, according to the CDC, lies in the vaccines, which are highly effective in preventing the development of symptomatic Covid.

This is important because, according to the CDC, it is believed that people with Covid symptoms transmit the virus more than asymptomatic people. Because of this, the agency said a fully vaccinated person who shows no symptoms does not need to be quarantined.

The CDC defines full vaccination as two weeks after receiving the second vaccine with two doses, or two weeks after receiving a vaccine with a single vaccine. Johnson & Johnson has filed for emergency approval for its single-dose vaccine and an advisory panel will look into it at a meeting later this month.

Patel said she believes the CDC quarantine guide could be updated again if more Americans are vaccinated. But at this stage of the pandemic, she said, the US is in “an interim period.” Although she said roughly one in three Americans has either been vaccinated or developed natural antibodies to coronavirus because of a previous infection, “the other two people still have plenty of opportunities to encourage the virus to spread, especially given these more communicable variants. ” . “

To illustrate this, Patel offered insights into her personal approach to aspects of life after she was vaccinated. The former Obama administration official said she continues to wear a mask in public even though she is confident she will not get sick and die from Covid.

“I’m still doing all the things we’ve talked about – which we’re pretty tired of – until we have more data that I can’t give [the virus] someone who was not vaccinated, said Patel, who served as director of politics with the Obama White House Bureau of Interstate Affairs and Public Engagement, where she worked on health initiatives.

However, Patel said there are reasons to be optimistic and mentioned how she is thinking about the possibility of seeing her parents soon. “Because I’ve been vaccinated and after they went in a few weeks after that second dose, I’ll be more comfortable talking about risks because it’s not 100% that they don’t catch the virus, but I feel comfortable when I have a little meeting with them when we are all vaccinated together, “she said.

While vaccine availability is currently limited, Patel noted recent comments from Dr. Anthony Fauci on NBC’s “TODAY” Show. The nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases expects it to be “open season” for Covid vaccinations by April. If Fauci’s forecast comes true, Patel believes that by the summer more Americans will be able to gather together safely.

“As the months go by, more people in your household, and possibly in another household, like your parents or grandparents, will be vaccinated, which could make smaller gatherings safer,” said Patel. “We can look forward to that because we’ve been holding back for over a year, some of us, to see older parents and relatives at high risk.”