Shore Allergists stress the importance of getting vaccinated

Is it allergies, is it Covid?

One way you can try and find out is by getting vaccinated.

There’s a lot of misinformation about the vaccine out there spurred on by either politics or someone’s bias opinion mixed in with a tiny dose of selected truth.

Who better to trust than a doctor and those in the medical field?

Listen to Vin Ebenau mornings on Townsquare Media Jersey Shore Radio Stations, email him news tips here, and download our free app.

Two Allergists with Hackensack Meridian Health, Dr. Bruce Decotiis and Dr. Chirag Patel, both who work in the same offices on Route 88 in Brick and in Wall., are encouraging you to get vaccinated if you haven’t already and they have reasons, evidence, ways of calming your fears and concerns.

“There’s a lot of different opinions on this and for the most part, and not totally, most physicians are very much in favor of the vaccine in general. We have dealt with and are dealing with on a daily basis, a number of patients who have either had reactions to the first vaccine and want to know what to do or in the past have had what has been told to them is a risk factor,” Dr. Decotiis tells Townsquare Media News. “For instance, initially, when the vaccine first came out there was two patients over in Great Britain who had an anaphylactic reaction. Now, they never really defined what that meant and they never really gave us any details about it bu they told us that means that pattens who have had anaphylactic reactions or are very allergic are at higher risk for a reaction to the vaccine — that’s NOT true.” 

Dr. Decotiis said that when they first started giving the vaccine, he and other doctors from his office were at Ocean Medical Center in Brick (right across the street from his office) every Thursday and did research on site.

“We were sitting there while they were giving vaccines to high risk patients. We wrote up a questionnaire for them to ask the patients and as time has gone on, we found a number of the questions we asked we’re not relevant,” Decotiis said. “There is no question that patients do have reactions to the vaccine, if you took at the safety of the vaccine however, these vaccines are among the safest that have ever been made.”

It is a personal choice for everyone to get the vaccine, that should be the case, but it’s important to be conscious of how you could accidentally affect someone else’s well being.

“I’m a big personal freedom person and I don’t think anybody should be forced to do anything but on the other hand you shouldn’t be allowed to put somebody else at risk because of your decisions either,” Decotiis said. “So the fact that you have not gotten the vaccine is putting your friends, neighbors, family, etc. at an increase risk. You have to deal with that. I’ve seen several horrible cases where people are adamant about not getting the vaccine and brought the virus home and it resulted in an unnecessary death.”

Decotiis said the vaccines, “by and large are very safe”, and in certain cases they will test for underlying conditions to see what kind of allergic reactions someone may have to the vaccine.

If you’re someone who suffers from allergies and asthma, you can always check with your primary care doctor or allergist before getting a vaccine — ask them questions, run some concerns by them.

“If you have allergies, and remember sometimes allergies and allergic-asthma go hand in hand, so if you’re experiencing significant allergy symptoms and you were to get Covid, that could potentially lead to a more adverse outcome as oppose to if you weren’t suffering from significant asthma-allergy burden,” Dr. Patel tells Townsquare Media News. “One other thing is that if you’re not vaccinated, and we’ve all heard about these variants, you could potentially become that incubator where the new strain comes out that might be more resistant or infectious, and so that’s another consideration people should take when thinking about getting the vaccine.”

Many people may not understand how and why new variants keep popping up — it’s got a lot to do with people not getting vaccinated.

“Mutation in a virus can’t happen in the air, it can’t happen on a desktop, it has to happen in a rapidly progressive illness in a patient as the virus replicates very quickly,” Decotiis said. “So the more people who are ill, the more likely we’re going to get another variant.”

We’ll keep getting more variants. Dr. Decotiis explains, if more people don’t get vaccinated.

You can learn more from Dr. Decotiis and Dr. Patel here:

First Responders Appreciation