Cancer patients in vital need of COVID vaccines

As COVID-19 vaccines are being rolled out, an extremely vulnerable group is being overlooked: millions of cancer patients. Doctors nationwide are sounding the alarm that many state governments and the federal advisory committee charged with prioritizing who gets vaccinated should move cancer patients up to the front of the line, right after nursing home residents and frontline health care workers. Right now, they’re deemed a lower priority than “essential workers” such as firefighters and mass transit employees.

Yet cancer patients are getting decimated by COVID-19. New data from 360 U.S. hospitals show that patients with cancer are more at risk of catching COVID-19 than the rest of the population. Once infected they are nearly twice as likely to be seriously ill and need hospitalization.

Even worse, they are three times as likely to die as other hospitalized COVID-19 patients, according to the new findings in the journal JAMA Oncology.

Pulmonologist Daniel Libby explains that cancer patients probably get infected frequently because they tend to visit doctor’s offices. Also, their “defenses are low,” meaning their immune systems are weaker.

This week, the COVID-Lung Cancer Consortium — a group of oncologists — is calling on the feds to re-examine priorities and pay “specific attention to this vulnerable population.”

Cancer advocates are getting ignored. The American Society of Clinical Oncology and The American Cancer Society urged the federal advisory committee to make vaccinating cancer patients a top priority, but the committee’s recommendation, announced Dec. 20, prioritized essential workers and people ages 75 and over to be next in line. That means some 17 million people with a history of cancer have to wait months longer.

Fred Hirsch, a renowned lung cancer specialist at Mount Sinai, argues for making them a high priority.

He’s also investigating whether their weakened immune systems will mean they produce fewer antibodies when vaccinated. They may need more vaccinations — three shots instead of the two currently prescribed for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. This is all the more reason to get them started.

Meanwhile, in New York, politically connected unions representing transit workers and hospitality employees are calling state officials and pushing to be considered in the next round of “essential workers.”

But cancer doctors complain they’re in the dark about whom to call or when they’ll have vaccines.

Ditto for doctors treating patients with other illnesses.

A Westchester woman tells me she’s worried about her husband. He’s 71, with Type 1 Diabetes and two heart stents, and he commutes to New York City on the train. His doctors don’t know when they’ll get vaccines. She says, “I can’t believe 20-year-old supermarket workers will get it before him.”

The truth is that COVID-19 is an equal-opportunity killer. It is slaughtering cancer patients.

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Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and author of “The Next Pandemic,” available at Amazon.com.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/38MWfY9