Should myeloma patients be receiving the COVID-19 vaccination?

A COVID vaccine would be recommended for every myeloma patient unless there's a contraindication such as allergy. The other times where we have asked them to wait for the vaccine when if they're going for their transplant so we can give them the vaccine. Because we believe that they will have some antibody response, maybe not as good as a person without myeloma, but we do think that some protection is better than none. Question has been asked by the patients, which vaccine should I get? My response always is the one vaccine that you can get. There is no preferred vaccine outside of certain settings. For example, I want to bring up J&J because there has been a lot of back and forth about it. The CDC eventually and the guidelines committee did say that there is no holding back on J&J. And we have to be mindful of what are the adverse events. These were seen in women less than 50 years of age. So you have to have the context. And even when we think about don't get J&J for certain people. So at this point, we recommend any vaccine that you can get a hold of. Just get the vaccine. For myeloma patients, we are very proactive in trying to identify them early in the course of infection so that we can provide this at the stage where the disease is still mired. So we actively screen our outpatient positive patients with hematological malignancies to administer these antibodies because we do believe that they have, because of their disease and the treatment, they cannot mount the antibodies as a patient without myeloma or without cancer. So we do look for them and offering them that treatment. And we've done this for many of our patients at our institution. So once the patient has had the vaccine and they do end up developing the SARS-CoV-2 infection, which we call a vaccine breakthrough infection, we would treat them as we would treat anybody without the vaccine. So if they qualify for the monoclonal antibody, we would give them. If they need different agents while they get admitted to the hospital, we would still treat them no different than we would have done it without the vaccine.