The cabinet is misusing the limited number of vaccines. The very elderly are given priority at the expense of younger patients. To the dismay of IC doctors, they tell BNR. 50 to 70-year-olds are most often on the ic and have the most life years to gain. Moreover, current policy does not reduce the pressure on ICs.
Lost vaccines
The ICs mainly contain middle-aged corona patients with a whole life ahead of them, says IC doctor Bianka van der Oord of the Meander Medical Center. But because they now end up on the ic, they suddenly run a great risk of death. According to her, the chance of this is about 30 percent. And patients who do survive the virus end up in a long rehabilitation process. The cabinet can save them an early death or long recovery if they receive a corona vaccination. ‘In this time of serious scarcity of vaccines, we must do more than just prevent excess mortality in the very elderly group. The current approach is at the expense of people who can live for decades with a vaccine. ‘
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‘If you vaccinate this group of people, you will have the most gain in terms of life years,’ says Armand Girbes, head of the IC department at the VUMC in Amsterdam. The doctors are supported by colleagues, including intensivist Nienke Josephus Jitta, who also noted that the pressure on ICs with the current approach remains unabated. ‘We only take in people with a longer life expectancy at an ic. People in a nursing home by definition do not have this. That’s why they don’t end up on an IC. ‘ The group of relatively young people without a vaccine makes the pressure on the beds so great.
‘Now focus on those who use the ic beds,’ says Peter van der Voort, head of intensive care at the UMCG. According to him, these are overweight men between 50 and 70 years old. “If you vaccinate them, you will catch 60 percent of IC patients.”
Reduce pressure
Several doctors see that vaccinating the oldest group of Dutch people does not reduce the pressure on healthcare. David van Westerloo, intensivist at the LUMC: ‘We are keeping our country partly in lockdown due to a shortage of IC capacity. If you want to relieve the burden on healthcare and get rid of the measures as quickly as possible, you must first vaccinate the people who call on the care. Those are not the people of 90 and older.
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Diederik Gommers, chairman of the Dutch Intensive Care Association, acknowledges that you must first vaccinate the group of 60 to 75 year olds if you want to reduce the number of patients on the IC. Yet he remains behind the current vaccination strategy. According to Gommers, we can save the most lives in relative terms this way. The death rate is the highest among the oldest target group. Although, according to the other IC physicians with whom BNR spoke nothing about the number of years of life gained.
In addition, Gommers says, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work exceptionally well in the elderly. According to him, you should look at the vaccination strategy again if we continue to be confronted with a shortage of vaccines and a third wave looms.
BNR also spoke to other doctors for this story, some of whom do not want to be mentioned by name.
