ST. GEORGE — After a winter that saw a local increase in respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), including record numbers among those age 60 and over, an announcement Wednesday has the potential to prevent that in the future.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first vaccine to prevent RSV specifically for those 60 years of age and older.

The FDA said Arexvy, manufactured by British drugmaker GSK plc, was approved after a clinical trial of 25,000 adults over 65 determined it prevented 95% from developing life-threatening pneumonia or other lung diseases that has caused hospitalizations and death from RSV among the elderly, the FDA said.

Also in its announcement, the FDA said the Arexvy vaccine had short-term sore arm and stiff joint side effects similar to other vaccines. It said the most severe side effect in the clinical trial was a rapid heartbeat for 10 among the 25,000 who had the vaccine and four who did not.

RSV, a seasonal fall and winter respiratory disease, has usually been a disease among newborns and toddlers in the past, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the virus recently has appeared more among the elderly. At the same time, in a majority of adults, it is not much more severe than a mild cold.

Earlier this year, what local doctors called a “blizzard of RSV” resulted in St. George Regional Hospital nearing capacity and local pediatric doctors having few open appointments.

Dr. David Blodgett, director of the Southern Utah Public Health Department, spoke Thursday morning at the monthly meeting of the Washington County Republican Women. He did not address the vaccine but did address RSV, saying the media has overblown the concern over it.

“We had this surge of RSV that’s kind of bigger than we’ve ever had, but it wasn’t really that much bigger,” Blodgett told the group gathered at the Best Western Plus Abbey Inn in St. George, Utah. “But the press has learned something. People get really excited about infectious disease stuff, right? You’re all worried, ‘I’m going to die from RSV, right?’” 

Blodgett added RSV is still more serious for newborns than for other groups. The new RSV vaccine is not recommended for those younger than 60. 

“It’s a serious disease when it comes to newborns,” he said. “It’s actually a serious disease if you’re 6 months old because it can be fatal in a 6-month-old and they don’t really have much to treat it.”

After his presentation, Blodgett declined to speak with St. George News.

“I think you learned that we don’t talk to you,” he said. 

Blodgett did field a question from one attendee concerning vaccines and what they said was a link between vaccines and the increase of conditions like autism and attention deficit disorders. The local health director said that was not the case.

“What caused a higher rate of ADHD and autism is we diagnose it more regularly,” Blodgett said. “Secondly, I think the interaction of social media and the constant hit of dopamine and adrenaline that gives these kids really creates difficulties for them to concentrate and be in another environment.”

The audience member then said there should be studies comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated and if the vaccinated have contracted more diseases. After Blodgett countered there have been studies, the audience member countered there have not. 

According to the National Institutes of Health, the most extensive study comparing diseases between the vaccinated and unvaccinated was completed by Germany’s equivalent to the CDC which found in a study of more than 17,000 people “no relevant differences” between the vaccinated and unvaccinated as far as instances of autism, ADHD, heart disease, anemia, diabetes, asthma or allergies.

COVID ‘wrap-up’

Earlier, Republican Women First Vice President Shirla Snow introduced Blodgett, noting his love of “Star Wars” on “May the Fourth” as well as his love of gardening, “even though he lost his sense of taste and smell to COVID.”

And Blodgett devoted a large part of his presentation to a “wrap-up ” of the COVID-19 pandemic, describing what he said was a successful response by the local health department while criticizing the response by the state as well as the media. 

“I feel pretty good about how we did, to be honest with you,” said Blodgett, adding that COVID-19 “turned out to be a very, very mild disease” for those who weren’t over 65 years of age.

He added his feeling is that the local response was more measured than the state and national response.

“Everything that happened in Utah was because of the governor’s orders, right? So they were not us,” he said. “We tried to highlight what the data really was to allow people to make their own decisions, but the political environment changed that.”

Since COVID-19 first appeared in Southern Utah in March 2020, 712 people here have died of COVID. There were 3,737 hospitalizations, according to data from the CDC and Utah Department of Health and Human Services. 

Blodgett told the group it isn’t fair to measure the COVID pandemic over a three-year period but to judge it year-by-year. 

“One thing about this that really actually kind of bothers me because is, in disease and epidemiology, we track diseases on a yearly basis, right?” Blodgett said. “It makes it really hard to compare a disease that we’ve now got three years and they all want to lump that number into one.”

In 2022, 497 Southern Utahns died of COVID of the 712 total in three years, or 69.1% of the total deaths, according to state health department data. There were 1,893 hospitalizations last year, or 50.7% of the hospitalizations of the entire pandemic.

But Blodgett noted during the recent winter, influenza once again usurped COVID as the top local non-chronic disease killer as COVID-19 abated. CDC officials have said that came about because of a combination of widespread vaccination and the virus becoming more contagious. On Friday, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency.

Thus far in 2023, according to the state health department, there have been seven deaths from COVID-19 and 112 hospitalizations. The Southwest Utah Public Health Department no longer releases up-to-date local numbers of COVID infections, hospitalizations and deaths. 

While praising the local response, Blodgett said a mistake made during the pandemic overall was the notion of “flattening the curve.” 

“They say, ‘Well, it’s important to flatten the curves.’ It doesn’t really matter,” Blodgett said, adding that data from the influenza pandemic of 1918 – which he called a “real pandemic” compared with COVID – showed attempts to flatten the curve had no effect ultimately on the number who died. “So are you ever going to stop the spread enough that you’re going to make a difference? No, you can’t. You can’t shut down an upper respiratory tract infection.”

Blodgett said another mistake was the mandate for people to take the COVID-19 vaccine, especially healthcare workers. 

“We never mandate things. It’s dumb because the immediate response to any mandate is, ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’” Blodgett said. “We learned that with cigarettes. You have this big warning on the side of cigarettes that ‘cigarettes are dumb, don’t do it’ and so what does every kid do? Ignore that and smoke anyway.

“We did a big national experiment,” Blodgett added. “We’re going to force you to get vaccinated in order to be a healthcare worker and a bunch of healthcare workers quit and made the whole situation even worse. And so that is not the public health way.”

Blodgett called the number of people who died of COVID – which has totaled 1,131,819 in the United States – small as far as a percentage, saying 0.15% of Utah’s population and 0.25% of Southern Utah residents died from COVID.

“That means 99.85% of the population did not die from COVID,” said Blodgett who said the disease was overhyped by the media. 

“When you ask people, you take a survey and you say, ‘What percentage of people died from COVID?’ And you know what kind of answer you’re going to get? The answer depends on where they watch their news from,” Blodgett said. “The sheer volume of the information that was out there, I think, created a much different approach than we would have when we nationally ended up with about a 0.32% death rate.”

Other questions answered

After talking about COVID-19 and the effect of the media, Blodgett addressed other questions by those at the Washington County Republican Women event.

• Blodgett was asked if the Southwest Utah Public Health Department has a position on transgender therapies. “I don’t have a position on that. It’s a political area that we don’t have anything to do with,” Blodgett said. “But you can probably tell what I would say.”
• An audience member asked if there have been cases locally of rabies. “Every year, we have (five or six) cases of rabies,” Blodgett said. “A lot of times in bats but we’ve had a few cases recently of coyotes coming over the Arizona strip so we’re kind of worried about this invasion.”
• Blodgett was asked if there was a rise in local cases of bed bugs. He said there has been a resurgence since DDT was banned. “There were a lot of things that we killed off with DDT. So we’ve seen a resurgence of almost all of that. Mosquitoes, bed bugs, cockroaches, all of the things we used to use DDT for.”

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