Biden’s Beltway Booster Battle

While Israel’s seen dynamite data from its third vaccine shots and England is set to follow suit, America could be held hostage to a brewing Beltway booster battle.

Team Biden wants to start boosters next week — but the Food and Drug Administration just refused to recommend Pfizer’s bid to give the general public third vaccine jabs.

The FDA released a report Wednesday concluding it didn’t have enough information to sign off, as it “has not independently reviewed or verified the underlying data” of the many “potentially relevant studies.”

It won’t trust the three CDC studies that President Biden cited in calling for a booster campaign, nor Pfizer’s clinical trial, which showed that a third jab puts immunity back up to at least 90 percent. Nor data out of Israel, the first country to approve boosters for all.

Opening Friday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will be Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review. She’s on her way out, along with No. 2 Phil Krause, reportedly because they’re unhappy Biden is pushing boosters. Both argue in a recent Lancet piece that vaccines should first go to poor countries: science bureaucrats playing politics.

President Donald Trump created Operation Warp Speed to cut through bureaucratic red tape and produce vaccines in record time. Biden might take a page from that if he truly believes in his booster campaign.