Kaitlyn Hughes | news editor

Getting a COVID-19 vaccine on campus might look a little different this year with new recommendations from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The vaccine will no longer be offered at the mass flu clinics that take place in the fall. Instead, employees must contact the Center for Pharmacy Care, and students must contact Health Services if interested in receiving the vaccine. It will be available without prescriptions.

The new FDA recommendation authorized the vaccine for those 65 and older, and for younger people with an underlying condition that puts them at risk for severe outcomes of COVID-19.

Along with the new recommendations, pharmacists were also facing challenges with administering COVID-19 vaccines without prescriptions because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had not made a recommendation – which state law required pharmacists to follow.

The State Board of Pharmacy voted earlier this month to allow pharmacists to follow recommendations from authorities including the College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the FDA – instead of waiting for the CDC to vote this week.

“There were a couple days where we thought pharmacists weren’t going to be able to administer vaccines because there was no recommendation from the CDC, but the state board pivoted and was able to expand that pharmacy scope,” said Elizabeth Barton, director of the Center for Pharmacy Care. “It’s definitely been changing quickly and it’s going to change again at the end of the week so we’re just making sure that we’re staying on top of it so that we can have the vaccines available.”

Barton said that since the American Academy of Family Physicians is recommending the vaccine for all adults, students and employees can receive the vaccine without a prescription.

The primary benefit of the COVID-19 vaccine is the prevention of hospitalization and death, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Pittsburgh-based infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“I don’t think that the vaccines would have a marginal impact on COVID spread in college campuses, but certainly for high-risk students on campus and high-risk staff and faculty, the vaccines do provide assurance against diminishing the risk of severe disease,” Adalja said.

Barton said that the more people who have access to the vaccine, the more people will want to receive it.

“If we’re able to protect individuals in any way it can really help prevent complications from COVID,” she said.

John Alcorn, professor of pediatrics and vice chair of basic research at the University of Pittsburgh, was working in one of the processing labs for testing the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in 2020.

Alcorn said that when some people get the booster vaccine their immunity goes up and stays up for a long time, some people their immunity goes up but falls back down quicker and others simply do not respond to the immunity from the booster vaccine.

“You never know if you are the kind of person who needs these boosters,” Alcorn said. “Sometimes it comes down to protecting others as much as yourself. If you vaccinate yourself maybe then you are less likely to spread it to others.”
 
Kaitlyn Hughes can be reached at hughesk10@duq.edu