US said to be working on fall plan for COVID-19 booster shots

WASHINGTON — With a stockpile of at least 100 million doses, Biden administration officials are developing a plan to start offering coronavirus booster shots to some Americans as early as this fall, according to people familiar with the effort.

The boosters are likely to go to nursing home residents and health care workers, followed by other elderly people who were near the front of the line when vaccinations began last year. Officials envision giving people the same vaccine they originally received. They have discussed starting the effort in October but have not settled on a timetable.

While many experts argue there is no proof yet that the vaccines’ protection against severe disease and hospitalization is waning in the U.S., administration officials say they cannot afford to put off figuring out the logistics of providing boosters to millions of people until that tipping point is reached.

Among other indicators, officials say, the administration is watching Israel, where some data suggests an uptick in severe disease among older adults who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine early in that nation’s campaign. Some officials are concerned that even if a decline in protection merely results in mild or asymptomatic infections, those infected people could still spread the virus and prolong the pandemic.

Any booster policy decision is fraught, officials said, because the administration does not want to undermine public confidence in what have proved to be effective vaccines. Nor does it want to overvaccinate Americans when other countries have yet to even begin vaccination campaigns in earnest, increasing the threat of new variants that could spread to the U.S. and evade the vaccines.