Dr. Eric Topol:
There’s a lot we can do, more.
As was emphasized in the briefing yesterday by the White House team and CDC and NIH, we have to get the boosters way up from where they are. The high-risk people over age 50, only one in four in this country have had a fourth shot. And of all Americans, only one in three have had a booster at all, which is — ranks 67 in the world, William, below countries like Sri Lanka and Rwanda, Iran.
I mean, it’s really embarrassing. I mean, we were the ones that manufactured, validated these vaccines in record time, and here we are not using this as our protection.
And that’s also the issues of the CDC about our isolation periods. If anything, where they say five days and you’re good to go if you don’t have symptoms, if anything, with BA.5, it may well be extending. But the median infectiousness after COVID is five days, not five days isolation. That’s the median.
So, we are — to send people out after five days, the CDC is really ignoring that. Still today, the CDC counts fully vaccinated as two doses. And for a year now, we have known the importance of boosters, even back to the Delta variant. And it’s never been the principal message, a lifesaving potential for people at risk, especially by the CDC.
