Put trust in your doctor to tell you about upcoming RSV vaccine

In the U.S., RSV causes thousands of hospitalizations each year among children younger than 5 and results in an estimated 14,000 deaths of people older than 65. Credit: CDC.

So I'm getting ready to do a talk for the state medical society about a tale of three viruses – RSV, flu and COVID-19 – the similarities and differences.

What’s new  -- and similar -- about RSV is that a vaccine is close to being approved. Hopefully what’ll be different is that we won’t see the hesitancy and in some cases refusal that we saw over the COVID vaccine, and sometimes the complacency we see with flu vaccine.

A vaccine against RSV is about to be approved for pregnant women and for older adults. It may be available this summer. This is big because respiratory syncytial virus is the most common cause of child hospital admissions in the world and certainly in the United States.

RSV also is an underappreciated cause of respiratory disease in older adults in general. It’s very troublesome for older adults who are at risk for pneumonia, hospitalization and death from a respiratory virus.

I’ll be talking to the medical society about how it’s up to us as physicians to deliver a clear message about why this vaccine is important and why people should take it.

I've been doing some reading about how to get people to overcome hesitancy, and what I’ve found is it boils down to trust. People have more of a trusting relationship with their health provider than they do in the government.

So it’s time for us as doctors to take back the role of educating people.

People may want to know how this vaccine came about, was this the same technology as the COVID vaccines? It’s not.

But hesitancy is a trust issue, and we need to pay attention to the perception that when vaccines come about what is thought to be quickly, there's some explaining to do.

The important part about the RSV vaccine is that people have been working on it for 40 years. This is not new at all. Just like the research into the technology that gave us the COVID vaccine. That had been going on for years.

A lot of the work was done right here in Rochester by my colleagues, Dr. Ann Falsey and Dr. Ed Walsh. They were my trainees back in the day, and I’m like a proud grandfather in terms of talking what great scientists they are. My late colleague, Dr. Carolyn Hall, helped put RSV on the map. Finding a vaccine was her life’s work.

So I’m going to tell patients about the work done here, by people I know and trust. I think my patients trust me enough to take my advice.

And I'm going to be a role model, too, and just roll up my sleeve and do it. I want this vaccine.

If we get large number of people with this vaccine, we begin to put RSV in its place. Maybe we save lives, including yours.