Americans may need to get a single Covid-19 vaccination every year, federal health officials said Tuesday, making clear that the country will be living with the coronavirus for the foreseeable future.
"This week marks an important shift in our fight against the virus," said Dr. Ashish Jha, who is leading the White House Covid-19 Response Team. "It marks our ability to make Covid vaccines a more routine part of our lives as we continue to drive down serious illness and deaths and protect Americans heading into the fall and winter."
Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said on Twitter that it could be the right time to move to annual boosters if we could answer some key questions, like how well do the updated shots work? "In the absence of a dramatically different variant, we likely are moving towards a path with a vaccination cadence similar to that of the annual influenza vaccine, with annual updated Covid-19 shots matched to the currently circulating strains for most of the population," he said.
"There's nothing we can do about that except know that we have vaccine platforms that will allow us to quickly move to address that," Fauci said. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said "the benefits of being up to date on your Covid-19 vaccines are clear."
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