A nurse holds a vial of COVID-19 vaccine and syringe. (Getty Images)

Wisconsin clinics and hospitals are stepping up the rollout of the newest version of the COVID-19 vaccination.

UW Health started offering the new edition vaccine to patients Wednesday and will start scheduling COVID-19 shots beginning Monday.

The Madison-based hospital and clinic system previously began giving the vaccine to people older than 65, considered the highest-risk population for the respiratory infection, according to Dr. Jim Conway, an infectious disease specialist and medical director for the UW Health immunization program.

The 2025-26 version of the vaccine is “built around the most current, circulating strains of COVID that are out there,” Conway said in an interview Wednesday. “As we all learned during the entire pandemic, these strains are mutating constantly, and so they’re constantly changing . . . You try to keep up with what’s the most prevalent.”

Major pharmacy chains typically get the first available allotments of the vaccine and have already, Conway said. In the meantime, UW Health and other health systems have been preparing to offer the shot and preparing their scheduling systems.

The vaccine’s components are developed following discussions among health experts for the World Health Organization and other agencies, Conway said. Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) take part in those discussions.

In the weeks leading up to Sept. 19, when the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP) opened its most recent meeting, public health professionals were apprehensive that the body might limit access to the COVID-19 vaccine.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has a long history of embracing unfounded claims critical of vaccines. Kennedy replaced the members of the ACIP with people viewed as skeptics of vaccination. Susan Monarez, appointed CDC director earlier this year by President Donald Trump, testified at a congressional hearing in September that Kennedy fired her for refusing to agree to his demand that she endorse ACIP’s recommendations without reviewing them.

Ahead of ACIP’s meeting, “we were all really nervous,” Conway said. Medical professional groups emphasized their endorsement of the COVID-19 shot to counter messaging from Kennedy and other HHS officials that appeared to cast doubt on the vaccine.

“Our professional societies make recommendations every year, but this year we really leaned into making sure people were aware of those and really were promoting those as … evidence-based, data driven,” he said.

When ACIP met just two days after Monarez’s testimony, the panel left in place the CDC’s recommendation for COVID-19 vaccinations from the age of six months to 64. While the panel’s recommendation highlighted concerns about risk, ACIP rejected a proposal to require a prescription for the shot.

“It’s actually in some ways reassuring that even people that may come across as skeptics and doubters at some level as they were repopulating the ACIP — even they couldn’t be swayed from how clear the evidence and the data is that these vaccines are really valuable and really safe,” Conway said. “It was a very pleasant surprise.”

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers issued an executive order to ensure COVID-19 vaccine access and the state Department of Health Services followed up with a health order that functions as a statewide prescription for the shot. The Office of the Commissioner of Insurance also issued guidance that insurance companies in Wisconsin are expected to cover the vaccine without requiring a patient co-pay.

Conway said with those actions insurers began announcing in the last week their coverage plans, which set the stage for providers to set up their vaccine programs.

The first objective of a vaccine is “to prevent you from getting serious disease,” Conway said, so patients don’t have to go to a doctor, “or aren’t getting admitted to the hospital or aren’t getting in the ICU [intensive care unit] or aren’t going on a ventilator or, God forbid, aren’t dying. That’s the ultimate goal, and that’s what the vaccines are really very good at.”

If the shot prevents a person from getting sick from the virus at all, that’s a bonus,  “but we know that that’s never completely possible with these kinds of respiratory viruses,” he added. “But we know that even if you get ill, you’re much more likely to have a very, very mild case.”

Vaccination also helps prevent the spread of disease as it reduces the amount of virus infected people are shedding, Conway said. That can reduce the chances that others will be exposed to the virus, helping to protect people whose immune systems are suppressed due to age or an underlying medical condition.

With enough people vaccinated, that allows  community immunity — “what used to be called herd immunity” — to develop, Conway said. That reduces the risk of outbreaks, “but it also starts to protect the really vulnerable parts of your population.”

The vaccine’s availability came as good news Wednesday to Patricia Fisher, a graduate student and the mother of a six-month-old. Fisher was disappointed this week when the vaccine wasn’t available at her baby’s check-up.

“It’s not just about my baby,” said Fisher,  who is enrolled in a sociology Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin. “The community is safer if more people are vaccinated.”

Fisher has a master’s degree in public health. While her own research focuses on food systems, climate change and health, she said she’s learned enough about population health outcomes to make her alarmed at the prevalence of anti-vaccine attitudes.

“I find it really, really frightening how anti-vaccine some people are, and that people are particularly worried about [vaccines for] COVID, flu and RSV [respiratory syncytial virus],” Fisher said. “COVID is a very clear and present threat to infant health and so it’s very worrying to me.”

Between the national upsurge in measles that has surfaced in Wisconsin, surges in pertussis (whooping cough) in the last couple of years, influenza and COVID-19, “there’s a lot of threats out there,” she said. “I just didn’t think that infectious disease would be the thing about parenting that would be the most stressful, but it definitely is.”

On Wednesday she made an appointment for her child’s COVID-19 shot in mid-October. “I’m thrilled it’s going to be available,” she said.

Conway said the flood of both information and misinformation about the vaccine can overwhelm people. “Sometimes the natural human response is to just hunker down and do nothing,” he said.

He counsels patience and keeping messaging simple: pointing to the decades of data on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines along with the number of professional medical organizations that have made recommendations on the basis of scientific evidence.

“I think people should understand that there’s an opportunity here to protect themselves and their families from these really potentially very unpredictable diseases that can devastate individuals, families and communities,” Conway said.