Hi CMC patients and families!
We are about to enter flu vaccine season which is a very busy season for us at CMC. Please read below for important details regarding the flu vaccine, as well as an update on COVID-19 vaccines.
Flu Vaccine
We are expecting our flu vaccine shipments to arrive any day now. We follow the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommendations that all eligible patients older than 6 months should receive the flu vaccine as soon as possible. If your child is coming in for a well visit over the next few months, please get their flu shot at that visit. If you would like to bring additional children in to receive a flu shot during a siblings’ well visit, please let us know in advance so that we can schedule a vaccine visit for them during that time.
For those who do not have upcoming well visits, we will also be running flu vaccine clinics on various dates in the fall. These visits are by appointment only and will only be able to be scheduled through MyChart. Please do not call the clinic to schedule these. Once we have the dates for the flu clinics, you will receive a MyChart message with that information and further scheduling details so stay tuned.
COVID Vaccine
There continue to be many uncertainties surrounding the COVID vaccine availability and recommendations for this year.
The AAP recommends that all children between 6 to 23 months receive the COVID vaccine as they are at highest risk of severe disease. They also recommend the COVID vaccine for children and adolescents greater than 2 years old who are at high risk of severe disease, who have never had a COVID vaccine, who live with someone at high risk of severe COVID, and those whose parents/guardians desire their child to have protection against COVID.
In contrast, the FDA has limited its approval for COVID vaccine in pediatric patients to only those with at least one risk factor for severe disease. We are in uncharted territory navigating conflicting recommendations between the AAP and the FDA, and it is currently unclear what products will be available and what insurance will cover. Notably, the Pfizer vaccine (which is what we have historically stocked) is no longer approved for ages 6 months to 5 years.
Our CMC providers support COVID vaccination of pediatric patients, but we will have to operate within the boundaries of what is approved. We are waiting on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and CDC to provide their final recommendations for who should get the vaccine. Once this last step occurs, it will take us time to understand insurance coverage of the vaccine and what is feasible for us to offer in clinic. At this time we do not know what we will be able to have in stock and cannot guarantee availability. If we do have COVID vaccines available, we will provide them in the same way we do the flu vaccine (in well child visits and in vaccine clinics). As soon as we have further information, we will send out a MyChart message to update families. Thank you for your patience as we navigate these unknowns.