Should patients bundle COVID-19, flu and RSV vaccines into single visit?
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
This fall, older adults in the United States will have the opportunity to receive three vaccines to against fall and winter season respiratory illnesses — COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus.
We asked Aaron E. Glatt, MD, MACP, FIDSA, FSHEA, chairman of the department of medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau and professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, if physicians should encourage patients to bundle the three vaccines into a single visit.
It needs to be nuanced. It needs to be for the appropriate patient — not every patient has an absolute need to get all three. There are some who should get all three, and for those patients, I think it is acceptable to get all three at a single visit.
From a medical point of view, though, giving all three at the same visit is not something that applies to many patients. RSV vaccines should only be given to the highest risk patients. For example, I don't think every 60-year-old patient needs to get the RSV vaccine.
That said, anybody who's getting an RSV vaccine should certainly be getting an influenza vaccine, but there are plenty of people who should be getting an influenza vaccine who do not need to get an RSV vaccine. COVID-19 vaccines will obviously depend on their prior vaccination history and whether they have had COVID-19, as well as many, many other factors that should be considered before saying somebody absolutely needs another COVID-19 vaccine or an updated booster.
So, the simple answer is, “yes,” and there will be patients for whom it would be recommended that they get all three vaccines — I don't think there is anything medically wrong with giving all three at the same visit — but not all patients require all three. In those instances, the clinician needs to sit down with the patient and say, “I might recommend all three, but I don't know if all three are absolutely needed;” or, “You absolutely do not need an RSV vaccine;” or, “Based upon your COVID history, you don't need another COVID-19 vaccine, but you should get the influenza vaccine.”
It should be individualized, it should be nuanced, and I think that we will get better compliance with people who really need it if we focus on them rather than focusing on everybody.
Collapse
Healio Interview
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts