January 5, 2021
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have confirmed that dentists, dental hygienists and assistants are included in their initial recommendation for health professionals to be among those who received the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines.
The CDC highlighted the recommendation on its website on December 28 after a report by the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an independent panel of medical and public health experts. The committee said that federal, state and local jurisdictions should use this guidance for planning and implementing the COVID-19 vaccination program.
“Early access to the vaccine is essential to ensure the health and safety of this essential workforce of approximately 21 million people, protecting not only them, but also their patients, families, communities and the general health of our country,” he wrote the CDC.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended on December 1 that COVID-19 vaccines be offered first to health professionals and residents of long-term care facilities. In a letter dated December 16, 2020, the ADA and 27 other health organizations expressed concern that the definition of the health personnel panel could lead states and localities to inadvertently neglect dental workers.
“ACIP’s definition of ‘health personnel’ appears to be based, in part, on the term health personnel in the 2019 CDC Guideline for Infection Control in Health Personnel,” the groups wrote. The coalition noted that the 2019 document does not apply expressly to dentistry because the CDC has developed separate and distinct infection control guidelines for dental environments.
“We are convinced that ACIP did not intend to exclude any health worker from its recommendation,” the groups wrote. “However, we would hate for jurisdictions to neglect dental, autopsy and laboratory personnel because of a small footnote in the guidance that was developed for an entirely different purpose (ie, infection control).”
The groups pressured the CDC to clarify.
In a letter of 20 November 2020 to the advisory committee, ADA President Daniel J. Klemmedson, DDS, MD, and Executive Director Kathleen T. O’Loughlin, DMD, noted that the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine recommended that dentists and their teams have priority access to a COVID-19 vaccine.
“There is nothing routine about dental care,” wrote the Drs. Klemmedson and O’Loughlin. “Delaying treatment for months, weeks or even days can make the difference between dying early, having a life-changing abnormality and living a normal, healthy life.”
For more information on ADA’s defense efforts during COVID-19, visit ADA.org/COVID19Advocacy.
The ADA has created a technical sheet for dentists about COVID-19 vaccines and also posted a hyperlinked map to state and local jurisdictions that contains details of prioritizing population vaccinations, as well as the most current information about where dentists are authorized to administer the vaccine.
The ADA will continue to monitor developments related to the approval and administration of the COVID-19 vaccine on behalf of the profession and the public. Visit ADA.org/virus for the latest information.