Q&A: Pharmacist Highlights Challenges in Vaccine Information Navigation Amid Changing Recommendations

In an interview, Cherokee Layson-Wolf, PharmD, BCACP, FAPhA, professor of practice, sciences, and health outcomes research at the University of Maryland, explored the evolving landscape of vaccine recommendations, emphasizing the critical role pharmacists play in guiding patients through complex medical information. She highlighted the challenges of maintaining accurate, transparent vaccine guidance, focusing on the importance of trusted health care providers helping patients understand immunization strategies. Pharmacists are increasingly tasked with interpreting scientific studies, navigating changing recommendations, and providing reliable information to support community health and patient well-being.

Cherokee Layson-Wolf, PharmD, BCACP, FAPhA, discusses the impact of shifting guidance on vaccination strategies. | Image Credit: Drazen - stock.adobe.com

Drug Topics®: How will the trust of federal health entities be impacted for health care providers?

Cherokee Layson-Wolf, PharmD, BCACP, FAPhA: Pharmacists still really play an important role in helping patients navigate their vaccination needs, and we have the skills to understand those recommendations and also the science that supports those recommendations and also where to find those related, reliable sources of information. Trust from patients was established well before these changes were made to the ACIP, so it's important to let those patients know where they can go to get answers, such as health care professionals like pharmacists and their providers, and the media can really be hard to navigate with conflicting information. Also, with quickly changing information, it's hard for us to even keep track, even as health care providers, let alone our patients, and so patients have really learned to trust their providers with their health care, and the difference here is that health care providers are also now at an impasse as to where to get that reliable information, and now we're going to have to rely on other organizations for those recommendations.

Drug Topics: What will be the likely impacts of this change that pharmacists will need to communicate with their patients?

Layson-Wolf: Organizations such as the HHS and the CDC have previously been our go-to institutions for those recommendations for all things health, including vaccines, and with the upheaval of those organizations and the change in leadership, it's really become challenging to understand who those individuals are that lead those organizations and who will inform on those recommendations and policies. So it's certainly going to be extra work for pharmacists and other health care providers to interpret those studies and recommendations, and also have to rely on those external organizations and the literature to really support our work in vaccines, and so this is really challenging for pharmacists, mostly because given in other states, our practice act as pharmacists often relies on the ACIP recommendations and the vaccine schedule to know who we're able to vaccinate and administer those those vaccinations to, and this could really lead to confusion among us as pharmacists, and also make it more challenging for us to help our patients while health care professionals and scientists were well aware of the work of the ACIP; the general public may not have been as well aware of the important work that they did. They looked critically at these studies that supported the that the evaluation of safety and efficacy of these vaccines, they evaluated which population should receive them, and ongoing review of that safety and efficacy after that vaccine was put on the recommendations and put in the market, and so that work and their discussions were actually available to the public. You could view them; you could view the meeting videos. You could view the transcripts and the presentations, access slides, and actually hear the conversation among the group, and so what's interesting about that change, what drove this change to the ACIP group, was that lack of transparency, and really, as somebody who actually listened and watched those ACIP meetings so I could actually understand the science behind those decisions, this was a very transparent process, and so vaccine studies were conducted with an eye to safety and efficacy, and a lot of those concepts were brought to the forefront of COVID vaccines because we were talking about it every day on the news, and our patients were experiencing it. So it makes sense that the public would actually be curious and have questions, right? So it won't be surprising that there will be a lot of confusion about where to find out information and who to trust.

Drug Topics: How can a pharmacist explain these changes to a patient worried about vaccine safety, especially if they heard conflicting messages?

Layson-Wolf: The very first thing we need to do as pharmacists is to understand the concern that our patients have and to share information with them if they're willing, and we really have to work together as health care providers and we can hopefully answer our patients questions well. This schedule also helped dictate insurance coverage of those recommended vaccines. So when the ACIP updated the schedule to include an addendum a few years ago, which included updates and immunization schedules in real time, it allowed us as pharmacists to provide those vaccines to populations that needed them faster because it gave us the screening information also helped that vaccine be covered by insurance.

Drug Topics: How do ACIP recommendations affect broader aspects of vaccine access and utilization, such as insurance reimbursement or public health programs?

Layson-Wolf: So skeptics continue to bring concerns regarding childhood vaccines, which would change vaccine requirements, potentially for school-aged kids, and those effective vaccines help protect kids from illness or disease. What will the schools look like if those recommendations were changed? We have to consider what impact that will have on our families and our health care system, and finally, local health departments would likely struggle with various outbreaks, and those organizations are already reeling from reduced funding for health care efforts, and we may not see mass vaccination efforts like we've seen in the past from local health departments due to changes in recommendations, lack of funding, and also possibly lack of staffing.

Drug Topics: Is there anything you would like to add?

Layson-Wolf: It will be important for us as pharmacists to advocate to our legislators about the importance of sound science helping drive health care recommendations. Pharmacists and pharmacies play a very important role in keeping their communities healthy with services such as immunizations. It's also important for the general public to understand what these changes may mean for them and that there is a long-term impact on our health in the US as a result of these recent events.

READ MORE: Immunization Resource Center

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