Boosters may give a boost to Biden
Expanded access seen as critical in handling pandemic
WASHINGTON — U.S. public health officials approved making booster shots available to all adults on Friday, opening a new phase in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic as Americans brace for another winter of rising infections and hospitalizations.
It’s a step that several states have already taken amid concerns that the effectiveness of vaccines received earlier this year could be waning just as more people are traveling for the holidays and gathering indoors.
The expanded availability of booster shots could bolster President Joe Biden’s efforts to limit the pandemic’s devastation, which has evaded his attempts to bring it to an end and bogged down his administration.
“The public just wants normal again,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “If it doesn’t work, he has a big political problem on his hands.”
The back-to-back decisions by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday will simplify the process for Americans who are seeking additional protection from the coronavirus.
Although boosters were previously available to older Americans and those at high risk of infection, now anyone who is at least 18 years old can get another shot as long
as it’s been six months since their previous dose.
The expanded authorization of booster shots was handled swiftly by an administration that has struggled to find ways to bring the pandemic under control, despite making vaccines widely available and free of charge.
More than 60 million Americans are eligible to get vaccinated but have not yet gotten a shot, and the more contagious delta variant continues to spread through the country. An average of 1,000 people die from COVID-19 every day. More than 770,000 have died from the disease during the pandemic, according to
Johns Hopkins University.
Nearly 196 million people are considered fully vaccinated, and more than 30 million people have received booster shots. Biden has also sought vaccination requirements to convince the hesitant or unwilling to get their initial shots, although the Labor Department regulations on private companies is currently tangled up in litigation from Republican state attorneys general. Biden is also implementing a vaccine requirement for federal workers and contractors.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki acknowledged Friday that there are limits to the administration’s
powers to end the coronavirus crisis without cooperation from Americans.
“We have done everything humanly possible,” she said. “At a certain point, it is true, that people have to go get shots, get themselves vaccinated and protect themselves.”
How the next few months unfold could alter how the country views Biden’s handling of the coronavirus, said Zelizer, the Princeton historian.
“It is the kind of crisis that, if it flares in the next couple of months, it all gets undone pretty quickly,” he said.
Biden already suffered a setback this year when his administration announced that vaccinated Americans no longer need to wear masks, only to rescind that guidance as the delta variant began spreading.
“It’s like PTSD on top of PTSD,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who has worked with Biden. “That impacts a lot of how people view life.”
Biden’s approval rating on the pandemic has been slipping since July, according to FiveThirtyEight, which analyzes polling data.
Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray said the struggle with the coronavirus has fed the public perception that Biden is not as competent as he promised voters.
“While people agree with the policies, they want to see that he can enact them in a way that gets us back to normal,” he said.
Reaching normalcy is a challenge. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, wasn’t sure expanded boosters would have a significant effect, saying that they’re mostly useful for people at high risk of serious illness.
“It is first and second doses that are the most important as we go into the winter, no additional doses,” he said.
Ultimately, he said, the virus “is going to be endemic,” meaning it will continue circulating at lower levels.
Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Medicine, said the coronavirus “is here to stay for many years, perhaps forever.”
Vaccinated people will likely need to receive regular boosters, he said, and it’s “close to inevitable” that the unvaccinated will contract COVID-19 at some point.
However, he was more confident that Friday’s decision expanding booster shots could have a positive effect. Wachter considers people who received their last dose more than six months ago to be somewhere between fully vaccinated and unvaccinated when it comes to protection from the virus.
“Bumping their level of protection back up will not only protect them from COVID but should markedly decrease the level of community spread, thus helping the entire community,” he said.