Fauci: Pfizer vaccine on track
Moderna could be delayed for start of booster campaign
President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser said U.S. booster shots against COVID-19 are likely to start only with the vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech SE, while the Moderna shot may be delayed.
“The bottom line is very likely at least part of the plan will be implemented, but ultimately the entire plan will be,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Dr. Fauci’s comments may lead to more clarity on the administration’s stance after Mr. Biden ran into resistance by medical experts who advise U.S. regulators over what they view as political interference in the review process.
While Mr. Biden has set a Sept. 20 target for kicking off the booster campaign, safety and efficacy data require signoff by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.
Mr. Biden on Aug. 18 touted boosters as a protection against the virus’s more transmissible delta variant, and said Americans should consider getting a booster eight months after their second shot.
Top medical officials, including CDC head Dr. Rochelle Walensky, warned the White House last week that regulators may only be able to act on the Pfizer shot, and possibly for just some groups of people, in the coming weeks, The New York
Times has reported.
Dr. Fauci said Moderna “is getting their data together” and may have submitted it by now. Any delay for Moderna would be “a couple of weeks — if any,” he said.
The company said Friday it had
completed its submission to U.S. regulators.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, criticized the Biden administration for “mixed messaging.”
“We need clear guidance on these booster shots because it undermines the credibility of it,” Mr. Hogan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I guess they slipped and pre-leaked an announcement about booster shots with all three vaccines and then had to backtrack it and say you can only use Pfizer.”
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain pushed back against criticism that the Biden administration is rushing booster shots ahead of the scientific evidence.
CDC and FDA officials were involved in setting the week of Sept. 20 target date for booster clearance, he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“We are ready to go as soon as the approval for the boosters comes from the FDA and from the CDC,” Mr. Klain said.
Dr. Fauci said plans for boosters involve using with the same brand as the original vaccination, but that mix-and-match studies are being done to determine of people who got one shot as the primary vaccine could take another as a booster.
Meanwhile, wealthy countries face mounting pressure to divert COVID-19 vaccine supplies to lower-income regions, with a new analysis showing they’ll likely have about 1.2 billion extra doses available by the end of the year.
The U.S., Britain, European nations and others could satisfy their own needs — vaccinating about 80% of their populations over the age of 12 and moving ahead with booster programs — and still have large quantities to redistribute globally, according to London-based analytics company Airfinity Ltd.
Those governments have so far delivered a meager amountof the supplies they’ve pledged to poorer countries as some move forward with plans for booster shots in a race to combat the delta variant. Health advocates worry that the slow pace will prolong the pandemic and increase the risk more worrisome variants will emerge. Some are also calling for more transparency on the agreements between governments and manufacturers.
“There needs to be an urgent global reckoning,” said Fatima Hassan, founder and director of the Health Justice Initiative, a non-profit in Cape Town. “We need to divert doses to those in need and open all the contracts.”
An independent review of the international COVID-19 response earlier this year urged high-income nations to provide more than 2 billion doses to poorer regions by mid-2022. Of the more than 1 billion doses Group of Seven countries and the EU have pledged, less than 15% has been delivered, Airfinity found.
The issue is often seen as a choice between going ahead with booster campaigns at home or reallocating doses abroad, Rasmus Bech Hansen, the company’s chief executive officer, said in an interview.
“Our data is showing it’s a false dichotomy,” he said. “You can do both.”
Global output is rising steadily, and disruption seems unlikely, he said. Production could cross 12 billion doses by the end of the year, including shots in China, Airfinity estimates. That’s more than the roughly 11 billion required to vaccinate the world.
Western countries have about 500 million doses available to be redistributed today, some of that already donated, with that number rising to about 2.2 billion by the middle of 2022, the analysis shows.