The abysmal nursing home booster campaign

The ideas and innovators shaping health care

Feb 17, 2023 View in browser   By Carmen Paun, Ben Leonard, Ruth Reader and Erin Schumaker Programming Note: We’ll be off this Monday for Presidents Day but will be back in your inboxes on Tuesday, Feb. 21. WEEKEND READ Only about half of nursing home residents have gotten the latest Covid booster. | Getty Images The Biden administration has tried everything to get nursing home residents boosted — except what worked the first time, reports POLITICO’s Krista Mahr. The Trump and Biden administrations’ first nursing home vaccination campaign was a bright spot in the early pandemic response: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention teamed up with CVS and Walgreens to stage free, on-site clinics at thousands of long-term care facilities across the country, ultimately administering some 8 million shots. Later, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which monitors the more than 15,000 nursing homes that receive Medicare and Medicaid dollars, introduced a requirement that those facilities’ staff must get their primary Covid vaccination. The two policies helped push both groups’ Covid vaccination rates far above the nursing home vaccination rates for other infections, such as flu and pneumococcal disease. But when it came time to promote the new bivalent booster, the administration neither sponsored clinics to distribute the shot nor mandated that nursing home staff receive it. The booster campaign’s results in the homes are poor. Today, just over half of nursing home residents and nearly 23 percent of nursing home staff have received the bivalent booster, a precipitous drop from the more than 85 percent of residents and staff who received the primary vaccine. That percentage is still higher than it is for most Americans: A scant 16 percent of the eligible U.S. population has gotten the updated shot. But when it comes to Covid, nursing home residents have never been like most Americans. They make up about 1 in 6 cumulative Covid deaths in the U.S., according to AARP, and hundreds of residents are still dying each week. In responding to Krista, HHS officials said they didn’t believe demand for the shots would be sufficient to justify spending the resources needed to put on clinics. Instead, they opted to encourage uptake, both among residents and staff, through education campaigns. TRANSGENDER ATHLETES IN FLORIDA: An association of high school athletics departments in the Sunshine State has waded into a thorny debate by deciding to ask prospective athletes for their “sex assigned at birth.” On a new episode of The POLITICO Show by Jackie Padilla and Mary Newman, Jackie explores the fallout.   STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today.     WELCOME TO FUTURE PULSE Hamburg, N.Y. | Getty Images This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Our Future Pulse hearts go out to actor Bruce Willis, who has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. The disease is categorized by a loss of speech, behavior change and unsteadiness. Though there is no cure for this form of dementia, there is research ongoing. Check out the Association for Frontotemporal Dementia for more info. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Ben Leonard at bleonard@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com, Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp. Today on our Pulse Check podcast, your host Carmen talks with Katherine Ellen Foley about a panel of outside experts’ recommendation that the FDA approve a nonprescription version of naloxone, an opioid overdose antidote, and its potential impact.   LISTEN TO POLITICO'S ENERGY PODCAST: Check out our daily five-minute brief on the latest energy and environmental politics and policy news. Don't miss out on the must-know stories, candid insights, and analysis from POLITICO's energy team. Listen today.     WORLD VIEW Fruit bats can carry the deadly Marburg virus. | AP The World Health Organization hopes to deploy experimental vaccines and treatments to combat an outbreak of Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever that’s deadlier than Ebola, in Equatorial Guinea. The day after Equatorial Guinea announced the outbreak this week, the WHO called a meeting of experts and developers of vaccines and treatments to see how many vaccine doses and treatment courses were available to potentially test. Nine people are thought to have died after people started coming down with infections in early January. Sixteen people are in health facilities with mild symptoms, and 21 contacts are being monitored at home, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. Marburg is transmitted from fruit bats and spreads among humans through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people and contaminated surfaces. No vaccines and treatments are licensed to treat the virus, which has caused rare and small outbreaks since it was discovered in 1967. What’s next: A WHO expert committee will decide which of five experimental vaccines to test in a clinical trial if Equatorial Guinean authorities sign off. All five have been shown to be protective in monkeys. Two vaccines, both based on adenoviruses, have gone through Phase 1 tests in people, showing they’re generally safe. One is produced by Sabin Vaccine Institute and the other by Janssen, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine division. The three other vaccines use the same harmless animal virus employed in Ervebo, Merck’s licensed vaccine against the Zaire strain of Ebola. They’re under development by IAVI, a nonprofit research organization; Public Health Vaccines, a biotech company; and vaccine makers Auro and Emergent. Even so: There might not be enough vaccines ready to go. Sabin has only a few hundred doses on hand, while Public Health Vaccines has about 300. Janssen has about 3,500 doses, which expire in April. But its vaccine has a downside: It’s made of two doses, given 56 days apart, which makes it unlikely to quell the outbreak quickly, even if it’s effective. The WHO says at least two drugs could be tested as treatments: a monoclonal antibody developed by Mapp Biopharmaceutical and drugmaker Gilead’s remdesivir, which has been licensed against Covid and has shown effectiveness against the Zaire strain of Ebola. Gilead and its manufacturing partners have enough doses for testing in Equatorial Guinea, a company representative said.   Follow us on Twitter Ben Leonard @_BenLeonard_ Ruth Reader @RuthReader Carmen Paun @carmenpaun Erin Schumaker @erinlschumaker   Follow us

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