Biden’s Controversial COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Plan
Last month, the Biden administration announced a plan to begin administering third shots of the two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to healthy people in mid-September to shore up potentially flagging immunity to the coronavirus.
But many scientists say that given the available evidence, which shows the two-dose vaccines still provide formidable protection against severe disease, it’s not yet clear that boosters are needed.
“What we expected from this vaccine is that we wanted it to protect against severe disease and the kind of disease that caused you to go to the hospital or ICU. That was the goal — keep people out of the hospital and keep them out of the morgue,” Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us. “There’s no evidence that there’s any fading of immunity in that regard.”
In fact, on Sept. 3, Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, a few weeks after backing the plan, told the White House that the FDA and CDC might only be able to make a determination on the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for a subset of non-immunocompromised people in the next several weeks. That’s because of a lack of data on both vaccines in the larger population.
Moreover, some experts say booster shots are unlikely to alter the trajectory of the pandemic much — and that the doses would be much better spent getting people around the world immunized with first and second shots.
“I’m truly disappointed. This decision is not justifiable at all looking at this data,” tweeted Dr. Muge Cevik, a physician and infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who also serves as a COVID-19 advisor to the Scottish and U.K. governments. “We are going to use up millions of doses to reduce the small risk of mild infections in fully protected [people with] a tiny risk of hospitalisation, while most of the world waits for a first dose.”
The controversial announcement, made in an Aug. 18 press briefing by multiple top public health officials, proposed offering a third “booster” shot to Americans eight months after their second dose of a Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine. According to the plan, this would mean those initially prioritized for the first two doses — primarily older people and health care workers — would also get first dibs on a booster.
The nation’s health agencies had already signed off on providing a third dose of the mRNA vaccines to immunocompromised people. The Food and Drug Administration authorized additional doses in that population for emergency use on Aug. 12, and
