Fauci Floats Yearly COVID-19 Shots While Promoting Boosters
A top U.S. health official on Sept. 6 said that COVID-19 vaccines could turn into a yearly shot, similar to the annual recommended influenza vaccine.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that looking forward with the COVID-19 pandemic, in the absence of a dramatically different variant, we likely are moving towards a path with a vaccination cadence similar to that with the annual influenza vaccine, with annual updated COVID-19 shots matched to the currently circulating strains for most of the population,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told a virtual briefing.
“However, some particularly vulnerable groups may continue to need more frequent vaccination against COVID-19,” Fauci added.
Fauci’s agency does not clear vaccines or deal with vaccination recommendations, but he has often been the government’s most visible health official during the COVID-19 pandemic and previewed key shifts in policy.
And another key official, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, also spoke of yearly vaccinations.
Barring any major differences in new variants, “for a large majority of Americans, we are moving to a point where a single annual COVID shot should provide a high degree of protection against serious illness all year,” Jha claimed during the briefing.
Critics chastised the officials for speaking about annual vaccinations in light of the dearth of data on the updated boosters.
“Health authorities say a majority of Americans can count on annual COVID vaccinations moving forward, prior to having a scintilla of clinical data on the new boosters & [with] no idea about clinical meaningfulness & duration of effect. How are we supposed to think they’re data-driven?” Jessica Adams, a former regulatory review officer at the Food and Drug Administration, wrote on Twitter.
The officials were speaking days after U.S. regulators authorized
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