CALLICOON — Dr. Gene Burns of Riverside Remedies in Callicoon was the first Sullivan County pharmacist to offer Moderna vaccines to the general public last spring.

And now he is planning on administering the third shot this fall.

“I’ve gotten so many phone calls [inquiring about the next dose],” Burns said on Wednesday afternoon. “Because we [Riverside Remedies] started so early in administering shots, a lot of our patients are now at the 8-month mark.”

Burns said the third shot will contain the exact same dose of medicine as the first two Moderna vaccine shots.
“Because it is the same medicine it doesn’t expand your [immune] coverage, it just makes it more durable,” he explained.

Dr. Burns also said that guidance has changed on receiving vaccine and flu shots together – which he is also expecting to receive at the end of September.

“It is ideal if you can just give two shots at once,” he said. “We were always taught to wait four weeks between shots but experts said you can administer Covid shots without respect to other vaccines.”

Learn from experience
Burns said initially his company’s website was an ideal portal to have patients sign up for appointments and then receive their initial vaccine and second dose by appointment.

But as other pharmacies and government agencies started giving out shots, Dr. Burns said some patients would go elsewhere for their shot but forgot to cancel their appointment on his portal.

“This left me with many extra doses,” he said. “I am probably not going to do it like last time. I am leary of ordering a lot of doses and have people missing ap­pointments.

“I will order about 100 doses at a time,” he said.

Riverside Remedies will announce which days and times the vaccine will be available and patients can come in.

“I was really disappointed with how it [the number of people getting vaccinated] dropped,” Dr. Burns said.

He added, “We often get calls from patients reporting problems with getting their Excelsior pass through the {New York State Dept. of Health] DOH website. If a patient is not found in the database, the error page (annoyingly) refers patients back to the provider to ask them to fix the error.

“Our records had to be exact week to week to remain in the program, so it isn’t an error in documentation; almost universally it is a telephone number mismatch,” he continued. “Many people used their mobile numbers to sign up initially, but tend to be using their home landlines in the Excelsior pass process.

“If the number they enter does not exactly match the number they gave us last spring, it will likely reject. Usually trying multiple possible numbers resolves the issue,” he said.

While Dr. Burns was really disappointed with how quickly the demand for Covid vaccines dropped, he will continue to administer them – but this time on a first-come, first-served basis.

Who can get the Additional Dose
While technically not a “Booster” shot, the New York State Dept. of Health guidelines currently in place to be eligible for the additional dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine are stringent.

For public health purposes, immunocompromised people who have completed a primary vaccine series [Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna] or single dose of the Janssen vaccine are considered fully vaccinated 2 weeks after completion of the series.

However, an additional dose – at least 28 days following the last dose of the primary vaccine series – should be considered for people with moderate to severe immune compromise due to a medical condition or receipt of immunosuppressive medications or treatments.

These conditions and treatments include but are not limited to:
• Active treatment for solid tumor and hematologic malignancies
• Receipt of solid-organ transplant and taking immunosuppressive therapy
• Receipt of CAR-T-cell or hematopoietic stem cell transplant (within 2 years of transplantation or taking
immunosuppression therapy)
• Moderate or severe primary immunodeficiency (e.g., DiGeorge syndrome, Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome)
• Advanced or untreated HIV infection
• Active treatment with high-dose corticosteroids (i.e., ≥20mg prednisone or equivalent per day), alkylating agents, antimetabolites, transplant-related immunosuppressive drugs, cancer chemotherapeutic agents classified as severely immunosuppressive, tumor-necrosis (TNF) blockers, and other biologic agents that are immunosuppressive or immunomodulatory.

All individuals 12 years of age and older are eligible to be vaccinated. However, minors 12 through 17 are NOT authorized to receive the Janssen/Johnson & Johnson or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. They may ONLY receive Pfizer-BioNTech at this time pursuant to the FDA EUA. Children under 12 years of age are not yet authorized to receive ANY COVID-19 vaccine.