Why University of Utah experts want you to get a COVID-19 shot

With new vaccines now available, it’s time for Utahns to get a COVID-19 shot, a pair of University of Utah health experts said Wednesday.
“We’ve had a very active COVID-19 summer, as I think many people at this point know from personal experience,” Dr. Andrew Pavia, chief of U. Health’s Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and director of Hospital Epidemiology at Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital, told reporters during a virtual news conference on the updated vaccine.
Newer versions of COVID-19 swept through Utah and the United States, Pavia said, that led to a lot of disease and even deaths from the novel virus that sparked a pandemic in 2020. The Utah Department of Health and Human Services reported four new deaths from COVID-19 in the week ending Sept. 11, along with 106 new hospitalizations.
For now, Pavia said, COVID-19 is “on the downswing in Utah although not so much in a lot of the rest of the country.” With yet another variant of the virus already sweeping through Europe, he predicted Utah will see another spike in cases, possibly around the Christmas and New Year holidays.
What’s being called the XEC variant has already been reported in nearly a dozen European countries since surfacing in Berlin, Germany, in June, according to Euro News. There have been reports of XEC in the United States, but it has yet to show up on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 data tracker.
“It does seem to be more transmissible to people who have had recent infection and recent vaccines. So with that, we anticipate that will probably be a surge sometime this winter. I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t say when and I can’t say how high,” Pavia said, later suggesting the holidays as a “wild guess.”
Both he and Kavish Choudhary, U. Health’s chief pharmacy officer, urged Utahns to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
The COVID-19 vaccine, reformulated to target newer versions of the virus and available from Pfizer, Moderna and Novovax, are safe and effective, Choudhary said. While contracting COVID-19 would also help protect against future infections, he said by getting the shots, “you’re protecting others from getting seriously ill as well as yourself.”
Pavia said the effectiveness of the vaccines has become “a very complicated subject” because of COVID-19′s continued mutations. The new formulations are no longer “a perfect match” for the version of the virus currently circulating but still provide two to three months of what he termed good protection against infection, and excellent protection against hospitalization.
“That decreases over time because unfortunately, these vaccines aren’t really long-lasting like measles vaccine, which is good for life. That’s because the virus keeps changing. So this is a little bit of a game of Whack-a-Mole,” Pavia said, adding that COVID-19 is continuing “to mutate and find ways to infect people that have been vaccinated. Because that’s what viruses are going to do.”
Annual flu shots are also available now and can be given at the same time as the COVID-19 vaccine. While influenza typically peaks in Utah around the holiday season, Pavia said that’s happened as early as October and as late as March and advised getting both shots by November.
Everyone 6 months and older should get what’s being called the 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccine, according to the CDC. For those who recently received a dose of an earlier vaccine, Pavia recommended waiting three months from that shot before getting the newest vaccine. And for those who’ve recently had COVID-19, his recommended wait time is three to six months.
When it comes to children, Pavia said many have probably had previous vaccine doses as well as COVID-19 infections and “are developing a level of immunity that is protecting them from severe disease. They’re still getting sick, they’re still missing school. … But among older children, we aren’t seeing very many severe cases any more.”
Even though he said that makes it “hard to argue that you’re keeping them out of the hospital or protecting them from death,” there are still advantages to the shots for older children, including preventing what’s known as long COVID, lingering effects of the virus that are little-understood but often debilitating.
Infants under a year old “aren’t benefiting from years of exposure to COVID. So newborns in particular are still at risk of getting severely ill,” Pavia said. Because the shots aren’t available to those under 6 months old, he said people who are pregnant should make sure they’re up to date on their COVID-19 vaccinations.
Asked about people who hold conspiratorial views about COVID-19, Pavia pointed out about 30% of Americans have never gotten vaccinated, leading to more than 230,000 preventable deaths according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study updated in 2022. The CDC reports more than 1.2 million people have died from COVID-19 in the United States.
“This misinformation, this fear mongering, this concern, it’s not just political,” Pavia said. “It’s killing people.”
Choudhary said that from the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the virus “didn’t discriminate. It didn’t care what your political beliefs were, what your religious beliefs were. It went after everybody. I think we should be mindful that whether you believe it or not, it’s still out there. And it impacts a lot of people. That’s real, unfortunately.”