Articles related to VACCINES/IMMUNIZATION

As millions of Americans get vaccinated, you may be being presented with many questions about what’s next and whether your patients – and you! – are going to need vaccine passports to begin traveling again. Educate yourself and your patients with these five pieces of knowledge on digital health and vaccine passport apps. Whether the interest is international or domestic travel, the information applies.

The research, taken from the CLARITY study and published in GUT, found that 865 people given the Pfizer/BioNTech or the Oxford/AZ COVID-19 vaccine and treated with infliximab (Remicade) had significantly lower concentrations of antibodies when compared to 428 people on an alternative treatment, vedolizumab (Entyvio). Infliximab is prescribed to around two million people worldwide.

This Research Article from Blood – available as a PDF – discusses two main points. First, antibody response to BNT162b2 mRNA COVID19 vaccine in CLL patients is markedly impaired and affected by disease activity and treatment. The second point shows that, in patients treated with either Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) or venetoclax ± anti-CD20 antibody, responses are relatively low.

This article from the American College of Physicians (ACP) provides a deeper dive into the pause of the J&J vaccine, which was recommended by the FDA and CDC on April 13, 2021, after six cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) among patients who had received the vaccine was reported. The pause is being done to determine whether the vaccine is associated with any other types of thrombosis and to develop more specific recommendations for its use, possibly based on age.

The data, concluded in a report posted to the preprint server medRxiv, support prioritization of cancer patients for an early (21-day) second dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine, as barely one-quarter of patients with cancer obtained protection (28% immune efficacy rate, including 13% in patients with blood cancers) against COVID-19 after one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

In this podcast/article from KevinMD, the story of Dr. Hasan Gokal is examined, a Houston physician who was fired from his public health job and was subsequently faced with criminal charges for stealing a vial of the vaccine. His case was also brought to the Texas Medical Board. In a sea of regulations and protocols, were his actions well-intentioned and in the best interest of patient care and safety?