Improving Public Health to Ensure Patients’ Safety
Improving Public Health to Ensure Patients’ Safety
Our top priority is—and always has been—the safety of blood cancer patients and survivors. Cancer patients depend on community-wide health measures to help stay safe. Reducing community spread of preventable diseases through proven public health measures is critical to protecting those with weakened immune systems—like cancer patients—and to ensuring patients can safely access healthcare services.
“These days, cancer is not what threatens my health most—it’s infections like Covid-19. Vaccine requirements play a crucial role in reducing risk to cancer patients and immunocompromised people from becoming infected with Covid-19. We do all that we can to protect ourselves, but we can’t do it alone. We need our community’s help to stay safe.”
- Barry Birdwell
Cancer patients are at an increased risk of serious illness and death from Covid-19. Yet, up to one in four blood cancer patients don’t produce antibodies after vaccination. And, only 43% of patients who don’t produce antibodies after two shots will produce them after a third dose—making broad vaccination critical for patients’ protection.
Vaccine requirements and other public health interventions play an important role in reducing the risk that the immunocompromised and other vulnerable people will become infected with Covid-19.