The experts need to be clear with us about booster shot

To boost or not to boost? That is the question.

The Biden administration needs to quit its Hamlet routine and give us an answer.

A definitive yes or no on the need for vaccine boosters to reinforce our protection against COVID-19 is an absolute necessity if we are to continue inching our way into the new normal. I know that the science is complicated, the volume of data overwhelming and that even highly credentialed, well-meaning experts do not agree. But at this point, we need a decision that lets us get on with our lives.

The administration’s messaging on boosters has been uncharacteristically and woefully contradictory. The White House is ready and eager to move ahead with a new round of shots. The Food and Drug Administration seems hesitant and unconvinced. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which may have the final word, has not really shown its hand.

I’m fine either way. If the protection given by the two-shot Pfizer vaccine regimen I completed in March is waning and I need a third dose to be fully protected, then sign me up. If the science says I’m good as is, then reassure me. Just don’t leave me hanging like this.

Actually, I should have said I’m mostly fine either way. Now that the possibility of booster shots has been raised, it’s going to be hard for me to be fully comfortable with a final pronouncement that amounts to “never mind, forget we mentioned it.” I’ll accept that answer if I have to. But with the possibility of extra protection in the air, it’s going to be a tougher sell to convince me to forgo another vaccine shot than to get one.

We shouldn’t all have to become amateur virologists and epidemiologists because, as laypeople, we will surely get some of these decisions wrong. Maybe a third shot of the same dosage is fine. Maybe it’s overkill. Maybe the rate at which antibodies decline is different for different populations. Maybe a booster would be better at six months or a year than at eight months. The professionals need to reach consensus and deliver clear instructions for us to follow.

Since the day President Joe Biden took office, there has been no ambiguity in the administration’s message to the unvaccinated: Everyone who is eligible, which right now means every American over age 12 who is able to do so, needs to get the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine — all of which have been shown to be safe and effective.

After I got my jabs, I assumed, as I think most people did, that that was that. I was ready to go back to eating inside my favorite restaurants. I made plans to start going back into the office. I took my first airplane trips in more than a year. I felt invulnerable, knowing that I almost surely would not become infected with COVID-19 — and that if I did, the virus definitely would not make me seriously ill, send me to the hospital or kill me.

But then came the now-dominant delta variant. Delta is so much more infectious that some vaccinated people are contracting the virus.

I can do at least the basic math on this unnerving new reality for myself.

Pfizer says its research shows that the protection the vaccine provides against symptomatic infection decreases by about 6% every two months. If this is correct, I am still quite unlikely to be infected with the virus or to develop symptoms if I am infected. I remain overwhelmingly unlikely to be hospitalized with COVID-19, and almost certain not to die from it.

But even so, the uncertainty and fear I thought I had banished are back.

I don’t like the idea that I could be infected and become a worstcase scenario. I worry about the possibility that the virus could use me as a vector to reach someone who can’t be vaccinated, for whom the vaccines aren’t as effective. I hate the idea that I could harm someone else and never know I was the cause.

This is a new virus and these are new vaccines, so there is no way of knowing whether the gradual diminution of protection that Pfizer reports will continue in a more or less linear fashion, bottom out at an acceptable level, or even accelerate. Maybe there’s no need to worry. But worrying has become a habit — and the virus has claimed more than 668,000 lives in this country.

I understand that getting a Pfizer shot into an unvaccinated person would do more to stanch the pandemic than getting another shot into me. But in the United States, at least, vaccine supply is not an issue.

I really liked that feeling of near-absolute protection against COVID-19 that I had early in the summer. I’d love to have it back.