There appears to be no consensus on how and when the United States should go about delivering COVID-
There appears to be no consensus on how and when the United States should go about delivering COVID-19 booster shots to Americans.
On Friday, it was reported that top officials are urging the White House to cut back its plans to make everybody eligible beginning Sept. 20. As a substitute, there’s a chance only Pfizer recipients — and even then just a portion — will get their additional doses by that date because there is not sufficient data on the Moderna vaccine — which may have more staying power than Pfizer’s — and the Johnson & Johnson shot.
Count the nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb among the proponents of boosters, with the hope {that a} third dose (for Pfizer and Moderna) could be the cap the regimen needs. As Gottlieb explained throughout a CNBC appearance on Friday, it is possible that the first two doses had been administered so closely together that they basically served as two “primes,” rather than an initial shot and a booster. The third one, he stated, may very well prove more durable, so he isn’t yet predicting the necessity for an annual booster.
Others still think it is better to hold off for now. The Atlantic‘s Katherine Wu writes that many of the experts she’s spoken to advised her “the immunological argument for a COVID-19 booster this early is shaky at best,” which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That is because the vaccines available are still holding up well, particularly against severe illness and loss of life, and Wu clarifies that breakthrough symptomatic infections, while rising, are still uncommon.
Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Wu that people’s immune systems should remember the coronavirus, including the Delta variant, for some time. Therefore, boosters might not make that much of a difference, at least until there’s proof that they result in the long-term, durable antibody production Gottlieb talked about as opposed to a “boom-and-bust cycle.”
