An influential U.S. medical panel was meeting Wednesday to discuss who should get booster shots against COVID-19 and when, a question that has been more contentious than President Joe Biden’s administration expected.
The meeting of advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) comes days after experts from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – another panel – flatly rejected a White House plan to offer reinforcements to almost everyone. Instead, that panel proposed offering the boosters to the elderly and those at high risk of contracting the virus.
Although COVID-19 vaccines continue to offer strong protection against severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death, immunity against moderate infections appears to decline months after vaccination.
The FDA panel’s decision last week was just the first hurdle as the government prepares its policy for the reinforcements. The agency has not yet indicated whether it agrees with the panel’s recommendations and authorizes Pfizer’s reinforcements.
If it does, the CDC will then need to recommend who will receive the additional doses after hearing from its own advisory panel on Immunization Practices, whose meeting runs through Thursday.
The priority is the unvaccinated, which the CDC says account for the vast majority of COVID-19 cases, which are now climbing to levels not recorded since last winter. Some 182 million Americans are fully vaccinated, nearly 55% of the population.
“I want to emphasize that in September 2021 in the United States, deaths from COVID-19 are mostly preventable with the primary series of any of the three available vaccines,” said Dr. Matthew Daley, researcher at Kaiser Permanente Colorado and advisor to the CDC. which opened Wednesday’s meeting.
Much of the discussion at the meeting is expected to focus on who is deemed at risk enough to need an additional dose; for example, if health workers who are continuously exposed to the virus should receive it.
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