This year's senior class is the last group of students who experienced COVID-19 precautions in high school. With that being said, is COVID still a threat? To explore this question, two journalists from EITR attended the Globe Summit, an annual conference of expert speakers hosted by the Boston Globe at the Harvard Club in Boston, to listen to former CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

The biggest topic of discussion at the summit was the CDC's struggle–and continuing struggle–to get people vaccinated. While the CDC has worked to provide free vaccines to children through the Vaccines For Children Program, Americans are still not getting booster shots at the rate the CDC wanted.

After sending out a survey asking MHS students whether they would get the new booster shot, only 42% said they planned to receive the most recent COVID vaccine.

Walensky said that the “real issue” is a lack of public trust in vaccines, particularly among parents. 15% of MHS respondents who do not plan on getting the booster cite a lack of trust in vaccines as a primary reason.

About 30% of students who do not plan on getting the latest booster say they feel they’ve already received too many. Walensky refers to this phenomenon as “vaccine exhaustion”–the notion of already having received an overwhelming amount of vaccinations.

In all, 12.7% of students say they have never received a COVID vaccine. Additionally, 11.3% of MHS students are concerned about getting sick from COVID.

Walensky said that while the United States public health system is “deeply frail,” industry leaders have made efforts to address a “fragmented” data collection system and a shortage of 80,000 public health workers.

Walensky's key concern is that the pandemic could resurge and become a threat. She explained that while we are better equipped to deal with COVID, it can still lead to preventable deaths without increased coverage by the boosters.

As emphasized by Walensky, COVID is not going away. Despite public perceptions, she points to steadily high COVID-related death rates across the country and stresses the necessity of updated COVID shots.

Nationally, Walensky is concerned with healthcare equity and new potential pandemics, particularly the bird flu. She is particularly concerned by the underserved public health workforce and outdated data collection systems.

Despite her concerns, she adds that the United States has been using COVID as a learning experience for potential future pandemics. Walensky said incident response teams “flexed deep muscles,” and that their resilience can be used as a model for the future. While the United States is “not done with new and novel infectious threats,” she believes we are better prepared than before COVID.