The U.S. laid out its COVID-19 vaccine booster plan before releasing data on booster shots' effectiveness or announcing FDA approval for boosters' use in Americans who are not immunocompromised. Many epidemiological experts are critical of this move, as they believe it was premature.
The U.S. said Aug. 18 it is prepared to offer booster shots for all Americans who received two doses of Pfizer or Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine beginning the week of Sept. 20 and starting eight months after an individual's second dose.
The next day, Bloomberg reported the CDC had pushed back its advisory panel meeting to discuss COVID-19 booster shots for the general population by one week, as medical professionals are split over whether the shots are necessary.
Below are five quotes from experts who are skeptical about the booster plan:
- "I think we've scared people," Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told Kaiser Health News. "We sent a terrible message. We just sent a message out there that people who consider themselves fully vaccinated were not fully vaccinated. And that’s the wrong message, because you are protected against serious illness."
- "I have not seen robust data yet to suggest that it is better to boost Americans who have gotten two vaccines than invest resources and time in getting unvaccinated people across the world vaccinated," Joshua Barocas, MD, a professor of medicine at the Boulder-based University of Colorado, told Kaiser Health News.
- "While we know that antibody levels fall over time and that the Delta variant evades those antibodies a little better than its predecessors, we do not have good 'correlates' to the most important outcomes. Do lower antibody levels in the face of Delta really reduce the risk of developing severe illness, hospitalization, and death for healthy people in their early 40s like me? We don’t know," Jeremy Faust, MD, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, wrote in a blog post.
- "The whole idea of following the science is that you let your science go first, and then you follow it. The ramifications of FDA and Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices saying no, for whatever reason, are much, much bigger now than they were before this press push," Walid Gellad, MD, a University of Pittsburgh physician and pharmaceutical expert told Axios.
- Some experts think the booster plan confused Americans on what vaccines are meant to do.
"They're not a force field. They don’t repel the virus from your body. They train your immune system to respond when you become infected … with the goal of keeping you out of the hospital,” Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore told Kaiser Health News.