Are US Seniors Ready for an RSV Vaccine? Consider the Lessons of COVID-19, says Dr Kelly Moore

Low awareness of RSV in adults and misperceptions about the goal of vaccination aren't new challenges, says Kelly Moore, MD, MPH, Immunize.org president and CEO.

"With COVID, we saw a people trying to get their heads around this concept that vaccines are developed with the intention of protecting people from severe infection or disease, of keeping them out of the hospital, not with the expectation that they will completely prevent disease."

Kelly Moore, MD, MPH, was answering a question from Patient Care about whether there were lessons learned from the COVID-19 vaccine introduction and ongoing vaccination campaigns that would be useful to public health officials and clinicians as they think about communications for the new GSK vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for older adults.

Moore, president and CEO of Immunize.org, has extensive experience with large scale immunization campaigns and spoke with us about the low awareness of RSV in older adults and the public's misperception of what this type of vaccine can accomplish.

Kelly Moore, MD, MPH, is the president and chief executive officer of Immunize.org, a nonprofit immunization education and advocacy organization that supports state and local immunization coalitions and front-line immunization providers. She also is adjunct associate professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Until 2018, Moore served as the director of the Tennessee Immunization Program at the state's department of health. She has served as a voting member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Diseaes Conrol and Prevention and is an advisor to the World Health Organization. Moore is board certified in preventive medicine and public health.