With Pres. Biden ready to pull the trigger on booster shots as early as next week, vaccine experts advising the UFDA huddled to debate the merits of third doses of the Pfizer vaccine for people 16 and older.
Health experts are divided as the FDA panel convenes to review Pfizer's recommendation that people 16 and over receive a third shot of the vaccine.With President Joe Biden ready to pull the trigger on booster shots as early as next week, vaccine experts advising the U.S. Food and Drug Administration huddled Friday to debate the merits of third doses of the Pfizer vaccine for people 16 and older.
The debate has become unusually charged, in part because of White House involvement. Biden said he would only act on rolling out boosters if the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agreed. But his public pronouncement that the rollout would begin as early as Monday suggested the decision was a foregone conclusion, leading to accusations by some scientists that the Biden administration was pressuring independent regulators.
The next step would be a review next week by the CDC to determine who exactly should get a booster. After that CDC recommendation is made, booster shots would be available through any of the nation's 40,000 pharmacies, doctors offices and other sites already offering the Pfizer vaccine. The CDC has said vaccines still offer extraordinary protection against hospitalization and death, with more than 90% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 being unvaccinated. At Friday's FDA briefing, a CDC official said vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization in adults age 75 and older remained at about 88% through July.A new Israeli study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found 11.3-fold lower rates of infection and 19.
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