While COVID vaccines are being rolled out, an extremely vulnerable group is overlooked: millions of cancer patients. Doctors are sounding the alarm that many state governments and the federal advisory committee responsible for prioritizing who is vaccinated should move cancer patients to the front of the queue, just after residents of nursing homes and health workers come to the fore. At present, they are considered to have a lower priority than ‘essential workers’, such as firefighters, mass transport workers, possibly even supermarket staff.
Yet cancer patients are being reduced by COVID-19. New data from 360 U.S. hospitals show that cancer patients are at risk of contracting the disease more than the rest of the population. After being infected, they are likely to need hospitalization.
Worse, they are three times as likely to die as other COVID-19 patients admitted to the hospital, according to new findings in the journal JAMA Oncology.
New York lung doctor Daniel Libby explains that cancer patients are likely to become infected regularly because they tend to visit doctors’ offices. Their “defenses are also low”, which means their immune systems are weaker.
The COVID Long Cancer Cancer Consortium, a group of oncologists, this week calls on the federations to reconsider priorities and give ‘specific attention to this vulnerable population’.
Cuomo’s government must do the same. Last week, Cuomo launched the “Vaccine Equity Task Force”, including immigrant advocates, civil rights leaders, tenants’ associations, labor groups and churches, most of whom are political governors of the governor. But not one cancer organization made the list.
“We’re talking now about who gets vaccinated, and let me be clear, there is no politics in the vaccination process,” Cuomo said. It’s hard to believe, governor, considering who’s in the task force and who’s missing.
In New York and most states, cancer patients are ignored. The American Association of Clinical Oncology and the American Cancer Society have called on the federal advisory committee to make the vaccination of cancer patients a top priority, but the committee’s recommendation, announced on December 20, gives preference to essential workers and people aged 75 and older to be next. This means that most cancer patients have to wait months longer.
Fred Hirsch, a well-known lung cancer specialist at Mount Sinai Medical Center, is investigating whether the weakened immune system of cancer patients will lead to them producing fewer antibodies when they are vaccinated.
They may need more shots – three shots or even four, instead of the two shots currently prescribed for the Pfizer and Modern vaccines. All the more reason to get it going.
Meanwhile, politically connected unions in transit workers and supermarket workers in New York are calling civil servants and insisting on being considered ‘essential workers’.
But cancer doctors complain that they are in the dark about who to call or when they are going to get vaccinations. Ditto for doctors who treat patients with other diseases. A Westchester woman tells me she’s worried about her husband. He is 71, with type 1 diabetes and two heart tents, and he commutes to Gotham on Metro North. His doctors do not know when they will get vaccinations. She says: “I can not believe that 20-year-old supermarket workers will get it in front of him.”
Both the Federal Vaccination Committee and Cuomo defend the priority of “essential workers” because it means more minorities need to be vaccinated. Cuomo claims that “black, Hispanic, Asian, and low-income communities paid the highest price during COVID-19.” This is a politically comfortable exaggeration.
According to the data, minorities were affected by COVID only slightly more than other people. In the state of New York, excluding the Big Apple, Hispanic Americans make up 12 percent of the population and 12 percent of COVID deaths, while blacks make up 9 percent of the population and 15 percent of deaths. In New York City, blacks and Hispanic minorities suffered proportionally more deaths than whites, but only by a few percentage points. Asians experienced fewer deaths (7 percent) than their 14 percent share of the population.
COVID is a killer with equal opportunities. It kills cancer patients regardless of their skin color.
Betsy McCaughey is a former governor of New York.