COVID-19 Vaccine and Cancer Patients
With the ever changing COVID-19 landscape, it has been a positive month with the development of 3 types of vaccines. Many questions have surfaced with regards to these vaccines — how will these vaccines get rolled out to the public? Are they safe for the general population? Are they safe for Cancer patients? Should cancer patients receive priority?
These are valuable questions, with the research around these answers being continually developed. We posed some of these questions to the doctors at the Tom Baker. Their comments in general are that they feel it is safe for our patients to get this vaccine.
Any vaccine is “a risk” for cancer patients on active treatment. The vaccine will take longer to take effect. Like the flu vaccine, this is not a live vaccine and should be safe. If you have reactions to the flu vaccine then you will most probably have a reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine. Keep in mind you will need the booster vaccine in 4 to 6 weeks after the first injection.
Also- please view the following article for additional information on this timely topic.
We at SAMPS will endeavour to keep abreast of this topic and post developments as they become public.