During the summer, President Biden was talking as if he was going to personally be handing out Covid-19 booster shots to everyone like Tic Tacs by the end of September. Then, among ongoing disagreements within the FDA and CDC, the entire “booster shots for all” policy was shelved in early October as experts couldn’t agree how broadly the shots should be recommended and to what age groups. The entire issue has been pretty quiet since then, with a few states taking it upon themselves to allow various age groups to receive a booster shot if they choose.
Now, however, it looks like the experts in the CDC and FDA have caught up to the President, or at least they’ve been pressured from the White House, to approve Covid booster shots nationwide for all adults:
The Biden administration is expected to begin the process of expanding the booster authorization to all adults as early as this week, according to a source familiar with internal planning.
Despite disagreement among experts about who needs a booster, there’s broad consensus that older people and at least some with underlying health conditions should get an additional dose around six months after their first series.
But only 36% of Americans 65 and older have received a booster shot, according to the CDC.
“As every month goes by, the immunity wanes more and more. So as time goes by, you’re going to see more vaccinated people” becoming more vulnerable to the virus, NIAID director Anthony Fauci told Axios.
The Biden administration laments the fact that only 36% of Americans 65 or older have received a booster, but the administration only has itself to blame. Since the attempted rollout, the issue has become murky, with pushback inside the FDA to the point where at least two officials resigned back in September due to arguments over whether booster shots were necessary and supported by the data.
Now, however, it seems it will be full steam ahead for boosters among the adult population of vaccinated Americans. This, of course, doesn’t mean that all experts are cheering on the move. Many are concerned that booster shots simply aren’t needed for most healthy individuals under age 30, but opinions vary:
I am actually troubled with how some politicians and officials are advising boosters, including moderna, to everyone including 18 year old low risk men despite FDA, CDC, and Paul Offit not agreeing with that.
How is this okay?
(Which is why i'm tweeting repeatedly).
— Walid Gellad, MD MPH (@walidgellad) November 15, 2021
The issue is whether booster shots should be pushed on all adults, age 18 and over. The data is very clear that younger, healthy individuals see a very low risk of serious illness from Covid-19, and vaccinations do little in terms of preventing spread. Pumping younger individuals with yet another vaccination seems unnecessary, according to many doctors and immunologists.
Beyond the simple question of whether handing out boosters is necessary for many age ranges, some doctors simply don’t think they will be effective beyond the current vaccination doses as far as containing the spread:
“Honestly, I think that boosters right now are a bit of a distraction away from where we should be focused, which is getting first doses, especially since we know that even now, even with Delta surging, the primary doses of the vaccines are highly protective against serious infection, against hospitalization,” Dr. Anand Swaminathan, a New Jersey-based emergency medicine physician, said on Yahoo Finance Live
However, Swaminathan doesn’t think that boosters are “really going to affect very much” for several reasons.
“What we’re looking to prevent is the hospitalizations and the serious infections, and we don’t know that boosters really do that,” Swaminathan said. “On top of that, we’ve got some data out of the Kaiser Family Foundation showing that the groups of people that are getting boosters tend to be higher socioeconomic status, they tend to be whiter, they tend to be older.”
The jury is out, so to speak, on pushing booster shots among the broader population. Another valid question to ask is whether the designation of “fully vaccinated” will change to accommodate a requirement for booster shots, effectively creating a booster shot mandate on top of the vaccine mandate. That could all be moot, however, if Biden’s vaccine mandate is shut down by courts.
For now, it looks like Biden will be announcing this soon, likely as an effort to “do something” regardless of the expected or projected outcome.
