They got illicit Covid-19 vaccine doses — and say they’d do it again in a
Her stomach knotted in anxiety, Ogg was ready to say she was getting her first shot when actually she was getting her third. At the time, government rules didn’t allow for third shots, even for immune-compromised people like her who failed to develop antibodies after two doses.
“I was very nervous, because I am typically an honest person, but I wasn’t going to tell them the truth if they asked me. There was just no way,” said Ogg, 55, who was born with a cardiac defect and takes medicine to suppress her immune system so she won’t reject the heart transplant she received four years ago.
Many of them didn’t want to talk publicly last year for fear of being shamed, or even criminally prosecuted, but immune-compromised people tell CNN they lied — or were prepared to lie, or at the very least misled — pharmacists and other healthcare providers to get unauthorized doses of Covid-19 vaccine.
A senior physician at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells CNN that the agency knew about these unauthorized doses as they were happening, and that the government’s decision to later allow booster doses for this group rested largely on data generated by the very doses the government told people not to get.
The immune-compromised patients say they are allowing CNN to use their names because they want to tell their stories without shame, and want to hold the government accountable for, in their view, taking an inordinately long time to grant official approval for extra doses after studies had shown such doses were safe and possibly helpful to immune-compromised people.
“People sought [unauthorized] third shots because they feared for their life. We feared we were going to die if we contracted Covid,” said Janet Handal, a kidney transplant recipient who received her third shot in New York City in April of last year, months before the US Food and Drug Administration and the CDC gave their official OK to such shots.
“The CDC was not protecting me,” Handal said. “I don’t know why it took them so long to act.”
A CDC spokesperson did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
FDA spokeswoman Abigail Capobianco said, “vaccine providers should administer COVID-19 vaccines in accordance with the current EUA.”
‘I’m a rule follower’
When the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines rolled out in December 2020, no one knew if immune-compromised people would benefit from them.
Dr. Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon then at Johns Hopkins University, decided to find out.
That month, Segev and his colleagues started what he calls a “real world observational study” to see how well the vaccine worked in people with compromised immune systems.
They found that many transplant patients weren’t getting antibodies after two vaccine shots, that third shots often did elicit antibodies, and that the extra dose did not seem to cause any safety problems.
All of that was enough to convince Handal to get her unauthorized third shot at the end of April.
More transplant patients started to take matters into their own hands.
The Hopkins team followed 30 patients who got no or very low antibody levels after two shots and decided on their own to get third shots.
Steven Weitzen, a heart transplant patient who lives in New Jersey, is a Hopkins study participant who got antibodies only after an unauthorized third dose.
“I’m a rule follower — that’s how I’m built,” Weitzen said. “But we had every reason to do this to save our lives.”
Weitzen and the other immune-compromised people interviewed for this story also noted that by late spring of last year, there was plenty of vaccine to go around, so they weren’t taking…
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