Yearly booster shots possible, Fauci says
NEW YORK — Annual vaccine booster shots are a possibility in America’s battle against the covid-19 pandem- ic, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday.
Boosters provide the “optimal” level of protection, Fauci said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Asked about the possible necessity of annual booster shots, Fauci said: “It’s tough to tell.”
“If it becomes necessary to get yet another boost, then we’ll just have to deal with it when that occurs,” he said.
Fauci, the Biden administration’s top medical adviser, added that he hopes that one booster for the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and for the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot will do the job.
U.S. authorities began rolling out booster shots in August amid evidence that vaccines become less effective over time.
Last week, 16- and 17-yearolds who received the Pfizer vaccine became the latest group eligible for booster shots, under authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.
Some health officials have been discussing whether to make booster shots the criterion for what is considered full vaccination.
Fauci said federal officials will still consider someone fully vaccinated with two shots of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but he said a booster is still the best bet.
“I think if you look at the data, the more and more it becomes clear that if you want to be optimally protected you really should get a booster,” he said.
The U.S. is looking at yet another grim pandemic benchmark this holiday season.
DEATH-TOLL MILESTONE
The death toll inflicted by the virus hovered around 800,000 as of Sunday, with more than 1,000 covid-19 deaths being reported every day.
Reuters declared Sunday the 800,000 benchmark had been passed. Other outlets and organizations had slightly lower numbers — 797,346, according to Johns Hopkins
University; 795,727, according to The New York Times; and 793,937, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But with the dire daily death rate being cited by several trackers, the country is poised to top the 800,000 mark this year.
Cases and hospitalizations have been rising around the country, while experts fear the latest variant of the virus, the omicron strain, could prove to be more resistant to vaccines than were previous variants.
About two years into the pandemic in the U.S., where the first coronavirus case was detected in January 2020, Fauci was asked Sunday about “covid fatigue.”
“On that framework alone, just vaccination, we can go a long way to getting us through this cold winter season, which clearly is always associated with a spike in respiratory illnesses,” he said, adding that face-coverings also have a continued role.
OMICRON CLUES
The first real-world study of how vaccines hold up against the omicron variant showed a significant drop in protection against symptomatic cases caused by the new form of the coronavirus.
But the study, published by British government scientists Friday, also indicated that third vaccine doses provided considerable defense against omicron.
Government scientists Friday also offered the most complete look yet at how quickly omicron was spreading in England’s highly vaccinated population, warning that the variant could overtake delta by mid-December and, without any precautionary measures, cause covid-19 cases to soar.
Those warnings were reinforced by a computer modeling study of England released Saturday suggesting that even in populations with high levels of immunity, omicron could significantly disrupt life and overwhelm hospitals. Scientists cautioned that those projections could change as they learned more about the severity of omicron infections.
The vaccine study published Friday indicated reduced levels of protection. Four months after people received a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the shots were roughly 35% effective in preventing symptomatic infections caused by omicron, a significant drop-off from their performance against the delta variant, the scientists found.
A third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, though, lifted the figure to roughly 75%.
Two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine appeared to offer virtually no protection against symptomatic infection caused by omicron several months after vaccination. But for those recipients, an additional Pfizer-BioNTech dose paid big dividends, boosting effectiveness against the variant to 71%.
Still, the study’s authors said they expected that the vaccines would remain a bulwark against hospitalizations and deaths, if not infections, caused by omicron. And the researchers cautioned that even in a country tracking the variant as closely as Britain is, it was too early to know precisely how well the vaccines would perform.
That study was released alongside new findings about how easily omicron is managing to spread. Someone infected with the omicron variant, for example, is roughly three times as likely as a person infected by the delta variant to pass the virus to other members of their household, Britain’s Health Security Agency reported.
And a close contact of an omicron case is roughly twice as likely as a close contact of someone infected with delta to catch the virus.
Neil Ferguson, a public health researcher at Imperial College London, said omicron’s ability to evade the body’s immune defenses accounted for most of its advantage over previous variants. But modeling work by his research team also suggested that omicron was simply more contagious than delta, by roughly 25% to 50%.
“I think that there’s a significant amount of immune escape,” Ferguson said, referring to the virus’s ability to dodge the body’s defenses. “But it’s also more intrinsically transmissible than delta.”
The World Health Organization this past week said that some evidence had emerged that omicron was causing milder illness than delta, but that it was too early to be certain. Still, scientists have warned that if the variant keeps spreading as quickly as it is in England, where cases are doubling every 2½ days, health systems around the world may be deluged with patients.
Even if omicron causes severe illness at only half the rate of the delta variant, Ferguson said, his computer modeling suggested that 5,000 people could be admitted to hospitals daily in Britain at the peak of its omicron wave — a figure higher than any seen at any other point in the pandemic.
Scientists said widespread vaccination in countries such as Britain and the United States would keep as many people from dying as have died in earlier waves. But the experts also warned that patients with covid and with other illnesses would suffer if hospitals became too full.
“It only requires a small drop in protection against severe disease for those very large numbers of infections to translate into levels of hospitalization we can’t cope with,” Ferguson said.
It will take several weeks to understand how the current surge in omicron infections may translate into people needing hospital care. “I’m concerned that by the time we know about severity,” Ferguson said, “it may be too late to act.”
Still, scientists urged governments to speed up inoculation campaigns, share doses with less-vaccinated nations and consider measures such as more self-testing, if not new restrictions.