PORTLAND, Maine — Hospitals in Maine are preparing to give third doses of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines to people with compromised immune systems following the FDA approval to those specific people on Friday.
MaineHealth, Northern Light Health, and Intermed are planning to administer third doses to immunocompromised patients. Intermed is only offering them for their patients, not to the public.
"Those people who are moderately or severely immunocompromised, they didn't mount a sufficient immune response to the vaccines to begin with, so they need a third dose," said Dr. Dora Anne Mills, Chief Health Improvement Officer for MaineHealth. "Studies are showing that immunity from those vaccines may be waning after eight months and that a third dose of the mRNA vaccines may help to boost that immunity."
Right now, only people who meet FDA criteria are eligible to get the shot.
- Active treatment for solid tumor and hematologic malignancies;
- Receipt of solid-organ transplant and taking immunosuppressive therapy;
- Receipt of CAR-T-cell or hematopoietic stem cell transplant (within 2 years of transplantation or taking immunosuppression therapy);
- Moderate or severe primary immunodeficiency (e.g., DiGeorge syndrome, Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome);
- Advanced or untreated HIV infection;
- Active treatment with high-dose corticosteroids (i.e., ≥20mg prednisone or equivalent per day), alkylating agents, antimetabolites, transplant-related immunosuppressive drugs, cancer chemotherapeutic agents classified as severely immunosuppressive, tumor-necrosis (TNF) blockers, and other biologic agents that are immunosuppressive or immunomodulatory.
The Associated Press reports the federal government is considering making booster shots available to the general public, but it's unclear when or if those would become available.
Doctors agree with the studies that show the vaccines work well to prevent hospitalization and death, but that the highly contagious, and more deadly Delta variant is causing the federal government to consider these boosters.
"We're just seeing very, very ill people and almost all unvaccinated," said Dr. Mills. "People are commonly saying, 'I'd like to get the vaccine,' and yet, they're quite ill and it's too late to give them a vaccine at that point, not until they're better. The stories I'm hearing are very, very sad. Very tragic."