SPRINGFIELD, MO. – People with type 2 diabetes are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, but not type 1. Steve Edwards, President and CEO of CoxHealth believes this should change.
“Right now in Missouri, if you’re a 64-year-old who is brittle diabetic but you’re Type 1, you don’t have a vaccine priority,” Edwards said. “You’d be in the same line as a healthy 20 year old.”
People with type 1 diabetes have the inability to produce insulin early in life, and people with type 2 usually develop difficulty producing insulin later in life. According to Edwards, there are far more people with Type 2.
Dr. Linda Macgorman, an endocrinologist at CoxHealth, explained one reason why the CDC decided to exempt Type 1 from approval for the vaccine.
“The risk with type 1 is at least as high as with type 2. Why wasn’t the CDC cut as a result? And their answer to that is Type 1 is much less common, ”said Dr. Macgorman. “That doesn’t mean their risk is less, it just means that there aren’t that many of them.”
Currently, people aged 65 and over or those with high-risk conditions are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine.
Changes to COVID-19 mass vaccination events in Missouri
