The United States’ top health administrators told the White House that an expansive plan to begin offering COVID-19 booster shots to vaccinated Americans may have to be rolled out in parts and not on a timeline already proposed by the Biden administration, The New York Times reported.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Janet Woodcock, acting director of the Food and Drug Administration, warned Jeffrey D. Ziets, President Joe Biden’s coronavirus coordinator, on Thursday “that regulators need more time to collect and review all the necessary data,” according to the Times.
- During that discussion, “Woodcock and Walensky told Zients they may be able to approve and recommend booster shots only for people who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine,” The Washington Post reported.
- The health officials also warned that the CDC and FDA may need more time to determine if and when Americans who received the Moderna vaccine should get a booster, according to the Post.
Biden wants boosters in arms in September, if science says so
In August, Biden administration health officials floated the week of Sept. 20 as the date when boosters shots could be available, The Associated Press reported, but the FDA and CDC would first have to “evaluate the safety and effectiveness of an extra dose.”
- “When that approval and recommendation are made,” White House spokesman Chris Meagher said Friday, according The New York Times, “we will be ready to implement the plan our nation’s top doctors developed so that we are staying ahead of this virus.”
- Additional shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccine have already been rolled out to vaccinated Americans with a compromised immune system.
According to a Yale Medicine report, it’s normal for vaccines to require a booster as time goes on.
- “You can certainly look at antibody levels, and that does offer some indication of how much protection lasts. But even if they have waned, that doesn’t necessarily mean the body’s capacity to respond to exposure is gone,” said Dr. Albert Shaw, an infection disease expert at Yale.
- “One of the most amazing parts of the immune system is immunologic memory of past infections or vaccines. If you are re-exposed to something (via a booster shot, that follows the original exposure by vaccination), the memory response is even more vigorous than the original,” Shaw added.