Are Covid-19 vaccine boosters necessary?
Covid-19 vaccine booster shots won’t be necessary for the general public, according to an international group of scientists. It is the result of a review published in “The Lancet” on Monday. The results oppose the plan of President Biden’s administration, who wants to start administering booster shots next week.
Health officials with the Biden administration called for the government to start administering booster shots to the general public, but others were skeptical.
The N.Y. Times mentions data from Israel that suggests high effectiveness of booster shots, but scientists urged caution about studies affected by “confounding and selective reporting”. The Israel data was collected a week after those third doses, so there was no long-term data available in this case.
Fox News mentions that because of the danger of selective reporting and the general lack of fundamental reviews on this topic, Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the FDA, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, recently told the White House that they needed to have more time to review all the data. They both wanted to avoid conclusions without the necessary evidence.
The group of scientists, who published their article in the peer-reviewed journal called “The Lancet” found out that the advantages of a booster shot aren’t enough to make them available to the general population. According to an article from the N.Y. Times, “the vaccines hold steady against severe illness in all age groups”, therefore a booster shot isn’t necessary.
The review points out that people with weak immune systems could find some use in a booster shot. But in general, the experts want to use those doses on people that are not vaccinated yet, as they call the booster shots “not appropriate at this stage in the pandemic.”
An article from CNBC mentions how this new review came out exactly one week before the current administration planned on offering vaccine boosters to the general population. CNBC further mentions how there has been repeated criticism from scientists and health experts on this plan, as the data that has been collected so far wasn’t compelling enough.
The group of scientists that published the review included two FDA officials who were against the booster shots. Both of them are going to be stepping down from their job after repeatedly criticizing the plan of the current administration. Fox News calls these resignations over the booster plan a “mess for the administration”.
After the release of the review in “The Lancet”, it is not clear what the Biden administration will do. There is an FDA advisory group that is scheduled to meet on Friday to talk about the use of boosters for the general public.
Sources:
https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-19-vaccine-booster-unnecessary-fda-resigning
Lead: Short, precise, stating the W’s
Organization: Starts broad, gets more narrow – Inverted Pyramid
Sources: New York Times, Fox News, CNBC – reliable sources