America Created Its Own Booster Problems
By this point in the pandemic, the benefits of boosters seem pretty darn clear. Boosters continue the immune system’s education on the coronavirus, upping the quantity of defensive fighters available, while expanding the breadth of variants that vaccinated bodies can snipe at. During Omicron’s winter wave, people who received a booster were less likely to be infected, hospitalized, or killed by the virus than those without a boost; older people and other high-risk populations especially benefited from dosing up again. With a menagerie of antibody-dodging subvariants now dominating the world’s stage, and more certainly on the way, boosters feel more “necessary” than ever before, says Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington.
And yet, and yet. Eight months on from President Joe Biden’s announcement of his ambitious plan to revaccinate every eligible adult, tens of millions of eligible, vaccinated Americans—many of whom gladly signed up for their initial doses—still haven’t opted for an additional shot. Just 30 percent of the United States’ population is boosted, putting the country below most other Western nations. And with daily COVID vaccination rates only a notch above their all-time nadir and barriers to inoculation rising, the nation might be bogged down in its booster doldrums for a good while yet—leaving Americans potentially vulnerable to yet another catastrophic surge.
[Read: America is staring down its first so what? wave]
At face value, boosting be one of the simplest actions a vaccinated American can take to fight The very nature of the shots is an encore; at one point, the people who now need them “must have already decided a shot would be worthwhile,” says Van Yu, a psychiatrist at Janian Medical Care, in New York, who’s been working to immunize his city’s homeless population. For many, though, boosting is not about getting another shotExperts have not always sold boosters as the same slam dunk as the initial COVID-19 vaccination series; accordingly, unboosted people haven’t treated it as such. The country’s booster problem is the culmination of months of such confusion. It is also an exacerbation of the inequities that plagued the country’s initial immunization efforts. Booster uptake may present its own issues, but those only piled on the problems that vaccination efforts had encountered in all the months before.
