CDC’s Mandy Cohen says 16% of people boosted for COVID ‘is not enough’

Mandy Cohen, who led North Carolina’s pandemic response efforts, said around 16% of Americans have received the latest COVID-19 booster.

“That’s not enough,” Cohen said Thursday morning.

Her comments came as she testified for more than two hours before the House Energy and Commerce Committee about her work as the newest director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a position she’s held since July 10. Previously, she led North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services through the height of the pandemic.

During the hearing, she was asked to explain why getting booster shots were important and she listed the reasons for the committee:

▪ The virus has changed.

▪ Whether a person has had COVID-19 or the vaccine, their protection decreases over time.

▪ One in seven adults are developing long COVID from the virus.

“No one wants to be sick for a short time, and certainly not for a long time,” Cohen said. “And so for those reasons, we are encouraging folks to get the updated vaccine.”

She was also asked to explain if the boosters posed a safety risk to children.

“I’ve looked at the data, and ... that safety profile is there in terms of safety, and they are very effective in making sure that our kids are protected,” Cohen said. “I don’t want them to either get into the hospital, nor do I went them to get long COVID, so I got my own kids vaccinated.”

What you need to know about COVID ahead of the holidays: boosters, surges, variants

She added that around 15,000 people remain hospitalized with COVID-19 and around 1,000 die per week from the virus. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 1.1 million American adults and 1,700 children have died from COVID.

Cohen said doctors and health care providers are most trusted by patients in understanding the need to be vaccinated.

“One of the top reasons people don’t get vaccinated is because their doctor or their nurse practitioner just didn’t bring it up,” Cohen said. “We’re really focusing our effort … on making sure that our health care providers have all the information they need.”

Cohen said during the public health emergency she was able to look at real-time data and deploy resources where needed to educate communities on what they needed to do to keep themselves safe from the virus. Once that emergency expired, the data was no longer available, leaving her to rely on surveys to even estimate things like the number of vaccinated.

China’s role

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington, asked Cohen about recent spikes in respiratory illnesses and pneumonia in children in China.

“The lack of reliable information coming out of China is a troubling parallel to 2020,” McMorris Rodgers said.

Cohen said that the CDC is monitoring an uptick in pediatric respiratory illnesses in northern China.

“What we do know, as of today, we do not believe this is a new or novel pathogen,” Cohen said. “We believe this is already existing, meaning COVID, flu, RSV, mycoplasma, and they are seeing an upsurge.”

Cohen said the CDC has an office in China and officials there have been in touch with their counterparts to ensure they understand the situation.

Sickness in the U.S.

Cohen also fielded many questions about what the United States is seeing domestically.

Cohen said that the RSV season is in full swing, especially in the South. She said the country didn’t experience an early flu season, but is now at its beginning.

She’s also monitoring a spike in COVID-19 cases. She said as people have begun traveling and gathering for the holiday season, those numbers are going back up.

Vaccination and treatments

Cohen said what she wanted people to take away from all this is that it’s never too late to get an updated COVID-19 vaccine, and to ensure they have access to testing and treatment. She added that knowing what illness a person has and getting them the right treatment “really saves lives.”

This year, a new vaccine is available to infants and to people between 32 and 36 weeks pregnant, to protect against RSV. The upper respiratory virus affects older adults and infants. But because of stay-at-home mandates during the pandemic, some young children did not have typical exposure to the virus, and it could affect some older youngsters as well.

Cohen said young children get sicker from the illness due to having small lungs and bronchioles.

Cohen also fielded questions about a supply issue for the new RSV vaccine. She said that there were manufacturing delays, and so she’s working with health partners to ensure high-risk patients are prioritized.