CDC recommends giving booster shots for all adults
Endorsement made as COVID-19 cases rising again in US
Faced with rising infections and an anticipated surge in holiday travel, scientific advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday endorsed booster shots of the coronavirus vaccines for all Americans older than 18.
The agency’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, endorsed the advisers’ recommendation later Friday.
The move will fulfill President Joe Biden’s pledge in August to make the extra doses available to all adults, but it arrives after months of scientific debate over whether most people really needed boosters. The shots are already available at many drugstores, doctors offices and vaccination centers.
The CDC advisers said Americans older than 50, as well as those 18 and older living in long-term care facilities, “should” get booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines. All other adults older than 18 “may” get booster doses, the panel decided.
Recipients of Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine already were cleared to get a booster at least two months after the initial shot.
Earlier Friday, the Food and Drug Administration authorized booster shots for all Americans older than 18. But the CDC usually sets the clinical guidelines adopted by the medical profession.
Many experts worried that extra doses were not needed by most adults to prevent serious illness and death, and that a push for boosters could constrain global vaccine supplies even as people in many poor countries have not received their first doses.
But infection rates are rising again in the United States and soaring in much of Europe.
Health officials in Europe, and now in the United States, see booster shots as a way of shoring up defenses against a tenacious enemy and gaining the upper hand in the pandemic. France, for example, has mandated booster shots for those older than 65 who wish to get a health pass permitting access to public venues.
“Look what other countries are doing now about adopting a booster campaign virtually for everybody,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration’s top COVID adviser, said at a conference Tuesday. “I think if we do that, and we do it in earnest, I think by the spring, we can have pretty good control of this.”
In the United States, infections have increased by 33% on average over the past two weeks, to 94,000 a day. The CDC’s decision landed just as Americans prepare to spend the holidays with family and friends, gatherings likely to accelerate the trend.
The shots may help forestall at least some infections, particularly in older adults and those with certain health conditions. But many experts, including some who advise federal agencies, are skeptical that boosters alone can turn the tide.
The extra shots are unlikely to offer much benefit to adults younger than 65, who remain protected from severe illness and hospitalization by the initial immunization, the experts said.
“Overall protection remains high for severe disease and hospitalization,” said Dr. Sara Oliver, a public health researcher at the CDC, told the scientific advisers meeting Friday.
Moreover, more than 100 million Americans have not received even the first dose of a coronavirus vaccine. In the United States, as in Europe, deep pockets of vaccine-resistant adults are likely to prolong the pandemic, however well protected their neighbors may be.
Many pandemic-weary Americans, too, seem unmoved by the sudden push for boosters. More than 85% of the adult population became eligible when the CDC added depression and other mental illnesses to the list of conditions that qualify people for an extra vaccine dose.
But only about 18% have chosen to get one. And those may not be the people most in need of extra protection.
The most effective strategy for the administration would be to rush booster doses to residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities, said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center. These are the adults mostly likely to benefit.
The Biden administration’s single-minded focus on boosters may take much-needed attention away from social distancing, masking and testing, some experts said. “Boosters are just one piece of the puzzle,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. “A better public health approach would be to understand that right now, in the face of (the more contagious delta variant),we are going to need multiple tools.”