Parsia Jahanbani prepares a syringe with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a mobile vaccine clinic operated by Families Together of Orange County in Santa Ana, California, on August 25, 2021. An international group of scientists argues that the person average does not need a reinforcement of COVID-19 yet: an opinion that highlights the intense scientific division on the issue. (Jae C. Hong, Associated Press)
WASHINGTON – The average person still does not need a COVID-19 booster, an international group of scientists, including two of the top U.S. regulators, wrote in a scientific journal on Monday.
The experts reviewed studies on vaccine performance and concluded that the traits worked well despite the extra-contagious delta variant, especially against serious diseases.
“Even in populations with fairly high vaccination rates, the unvaccinated remain the main engines of transmission” at this stage of the pandemic, they concluded.
The opinion piece, published in The Lancet, illustrates the intense scientific debate about who needs reinforcement doses and when, a decision the United States and other countries face.
Following revelations of political intruders in the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, President Joe Biden has vowed to “follow science.” But the review raises the question of whether his administration is moving faster than experts.
The authors include two major vaccine reviewers from the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Phil Krause and Marion Gruber, who recently announced they will be leaving this fall. Among the other 16 authors are leading researchers in vaccines in the United States, Britain, France, South Africa and India, as well as scientists from the World Health Organization, which has already urged a moratorium on promoters until that poor countries be better vaccinated.
In the United States, the White House has begun planning boosters later this month, if the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agree. FDA advisers will weigh the evidence on an additional Pfizer shot Friday at a key public meeting.
Larry Gostin, of Georgetown University, said the newspaper “throws gasoline on the fire” in the debate over whether most Americans really need boosters and whether the White House was ahead of scientists.
“It is always a fundamental process error to make a scientific announcement before public health agencies have acted and that is exactly what happened here,” said Gostin, a lawyer and public health specialist.
The FDA did not respond to requests for comment Monday morning.
The United States is already offering an additional dose of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines to people with severely weakened immune systems.
For the general population, the debate boils down to the question of whether reinforcements should be given, although vaccines still offer high protection against serious diseases, possibly in the hope of blocking more “advanced” infections. mild among fully vaccinated people.
Last week, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said new data shows that as the delta increased, unvaccinated people were 4.5 times more likely to become infected than fully vaccinated people. more than 10 times more hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die. However, government scientists also suspect the decline in protection among older adults vaccinated early last winter.
The authors of Monday’s comment reported reviewing global studies since the delta began to rise, mostly from U.S. and European vaccines. The team concluded that “none of these studies has provided credible evidence of a substantial decrease in protection against serious disease.”
Because the body creates layers of immunity, gradual lowering of antibody levels does not necessarily mean a decrease in overall efficacy ”and reductions in the effectiveness of the vaccine against mild diseases do not necessarily predict a reduction in effectiveness (usually higher) against serious diseases, ”they wrote. .
The more the virus spreads, the more opportunities it has to evolve into strains that could escape current vaccines. Lancet reviewers suggest that greater benefits could be gained by creating booster doses that better match circulating variants, in the same way that the flu vaccine is regularly updated, than just giving additional doses of the original vaccine.
“There is an opportunity now to study variant-based enhancers before there is a widespread need,” the scientists wrote.