States brace for confusion over booster shot rollout

State health officials are bracing for confusion as they manage expectations about coronavirus boosters that President Joe Biden announced last month would be widely available to adults this week.

The two federal agencies that determine who should get a booster — the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — are not expected to issue decisions until later this week. But in last month’s announcement, Biden and his top health advisers set the week of Sept. 20 as the start for a booster rollout that would make third shots available to adults eight months after completing their original twoshot regimen.

Even though federal officials emphasized that the plan required FDA and CDC approval, specifying a date has meant “the expectation has been set by the administration that we now have to manage,” said Michael Fraser, executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

“It puts the states in a difficult position,” Fraser said in an interview Saturday.

During a call Friday, state health officials spoke of the “difficulty in messaging, difficulty in telling people to be patient yet again — yet another challenging and confusing message that doesn’t universally apply,” Fraser said.

Some states, such as Virginia, anticipating the interest in boosters, have posted online notices urging residents to be patient and to wait for further guidance once final recommendations have been provided by the federal government.

In some states, “there will be the expectation that there will be boosters” on Monday, said Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer.

“We’ve been trying to message for the past few weeks that we really need to wait on the FDA and CDC,” Zink said in an interview Sunday. “But as we’ve all experienced, this pandemic messaging can be challenging, and our platform is definitely not as big as the White House’s.”

In parts of the Northeast, in states with large elderly populations and high demand for boosters, “we just need to be ready for an operational plan” if the CDC advisory committee endorses a third Pfizer dose, said Nirav Shah, director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He said highly motivated health-care consumers have been emailing him about when and where they can get a booster.

On Friday, an FDA advisory panel voted to recommend that the agency authorize a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for people 65 years and older and for anyone at risk for severe illness six months after completing the original twoshot regimen.