Waiting on that ‘approval effect’

ASHLAND — Until Tuesday, Elaine Owusu-Ansh was one of the vaccine-hesitant.

“I’ve been going back and forth about it for a while,” she said. “Just the whole trust issue with it because it was created so fast.”

Elaine explained that she is, by nature, a very thorough person. And so the rapidity with which the COVID-19 vaccines made it to market didn’t settle well with her. But, having made a commitment to attend classes at Mass Bay Community College in September, Elaine knew she had to get immunized and so made an appointment to do so at a clinic co-sponsored by Ashland and MBCC.

However, she approached the task with significantly less trepidation knowing the FDA fully approved the very vaccine she had chosen for her shots – Pfizer BioNTech – just the day before.

“Just the FDA approving it kind of gave me the extra push,” Elaine said. “Still a little anxiety, but I came and did it.”

Public health officials are hoping millions more Americans will now ‘come and do it’ given the FDA has given the official nod to one of the vaccines. It’s expected the FDA will also be reviewing longer-term safety and efficacy data on the two other COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S., Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. But the timelines for approval on those vaccines are uncertain.

>>>MORE: Coronavirus: FDA grants full approval of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine

And, in the meantime, there is no way to know what proportion of vaccine holdouts have been doing so for reasons similar to Elaine Owusu-Ansh. In fact, most of the two dozen who came by the Ashland clinic for initial immunization were 12-year-olds, an age group actually excluded from the FDA approval language.

But Sergeant Ed Burman, Ashland’s COVID-19 Coordinator, said this was just the demographic they were hoping to reach.

“We thought it would be important, even though we’re part of a collaborative, to have some kind of a clinic in our community prior to school starting,” Burman said.

The ‘collaborative’ Burman is referring to successfully vaccinated large numbers of MetroWest residents across multiple towns last spring just after the Pfizer vaccine was approved for use in adolescents.

“We were doing almost 1,000 people a day over a six-week period,” Burman said.

The numbers suggest those ‘mass vaccination’ days may be gone for good. Sixty-five percent of Massachusetts residents are now fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Still, with the rise of the Delta variant and its propensity to elicit breakthrough infections, along with school returning, the government’s call for boosters – and now the first FDA approval – numerous clinic dates have been scheduled next month in Ashland, Framingham and other MetroWest locations.

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