Biden Administration Weighing Booster Shots This Fall, But Not All In Favor

There’s still no hard evidence that vaccine boosters are necessary, but the Biden administration is apparently planning to roll them out as soon as this October anyway.

Per MSN, officials are “developing a plan to start offering coronavirus booster shots to some Americans as early as this fall even as researchers continue to hotly debate whether extra shots are needed, according to people familiar with the effort.”

Initial booster shots are expected to be administered to health care workers and nursing home workers, as well as the elderly and compromised who were among the first to receive vaccinations late last year.

As of now, it seems Biden officials “envision giving people the same vaccine they originally received. They have discussed starting the effort in October but have not settled on a timetable,” MSN reported.

Much of President Joe Biden’s campaign centered on promises of containing or outright ending the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, but another wave of reported cases has reversed any progress that once was thought to have been made.

“Among other indicators, officials say, the administration is carefully watching Israel, where some data suggests an uptick in severe disease among older adults who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine early in that nation’s campaign, according to people who have reviewed it,” MSN reported. “Some officials are concerned that even if a decline in protection merely results in mild or asymptomatic infections, those infected people could still spread the virus and prolong the pandemic.”

The report added that some officials want to avoid booster shots, for fear of overvaccinating Americans “when many other countries have yet to even begin vaccination campaigns in earnest, increasing the threat of dangerous new variants that could spread to the United States and evade the vaccines.”