According to two individuals familiar with the matter, the Biden administration this month pushed coronavirus vaccines this month largely according to unpublished data from the Israeli vaccination campaign.
© Marta Lavandier / Photo AP
The White House and top health officials said in mid-August that they planned to launch the shootings for most adults starting Sept. 20.
Data from Israel, which will be made public as soon as this week, shows that the ability of the Pfizer vaccine to prevent serious illness and hospitalization is declining over time, as is the protection of the shot against mild and chronic diseases. moderate, the two sources said. The country began administering reinforcements to people over the age of 60 in July and has now expanded it to those over the age of 30, but so far has published relatively little information about the effect of the reinforcement campaign.
The Biden administration has long relied on data from Israel, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, to report its response to Covid-19. Senior officials from the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration have been analyzing the latest Israeli data for weeks, concluding that the U.S. should begin administering boosters this fall, another said senior administration official.
Although the CDC has published a number of specific studies suggesting that the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines against infection is declining, especially in the elderly, Israeli data are more complete and more alarming, they reported. this Monday in POLITICO three sources who have reviewed the data.
The administration’s focus on Israel’s data underscores the extent to which the U.S. relies on the experiences of other countries to predict the next phase of the pandemic here. This is due, in part, to the highly contagious variant of Delta that swept across other parts of the world, and in part due to better data tracking in countries like Israel that have national health care systems. The United States continues to struggle to collect and analyze reliable Covid-19 data because the federal government has long neglected the country’s public health infrastructure.
Senior government officials working on the federal government’s response to the pandemic have been debating for weeks whether to recommend reinforcements to Americans. The White House and top health officials said in mid-August that they planned to launch the shootings for most adults starting Sept. 20. the data supported the target. Two senior FDA vaccine scientists leaving the agency were co-authors of an analysis published Monday in the Lancet that found no evidence to give booster shots to the general population.
The FDA is examining Israeli data as it reviews vaccine manufacturers ’requests to offer booster shots, three other senior government officials said. One official stressed that, regardless of what national or international vaccine data says, the final decision on whether to recommend booster is up to the FDA. The agency’s vaccine advisory committee is scheduled to meet Friday to discuss Pfizer’s application for approval of its booster shot.
Asked about the extent to which Israeli data showed a decline in the vaccine’s effectiveness, Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said he was “impressed enough”.
“I would be very surprised if the U.S. data was ultimately not very similar to the Israeli data,” Fauci told POLITICO.
The CDC has published a series of studies on vaccine effectiveness in the United States, focusing on shooting performance after Delta came to dominate this summer. The results suggest that available vaccines still offer strong protection against serious diseases for most age groups and that advanced infections are still extremely rare. But studies also show that shots are less effective at preventing Delta infection than at older strains.
A CDC study published last week found that the ability of vaccines to prevent infections, including mild disease, decreased from 91% to 78% after Delta took over this summer. The study included data on 600,000 Covid-19 infections from April to mid-July and compared the relative risks of infection, hospitalization, and death based on age and vaccination status.
“If you look at it from the point of view of trying to stay ahead of what could be an increase in suffering and death before it really happens … and then you see this data from Israel and the suggestion of our own data, we thought that at The least they need to plan and be prepared to give vaccination doses of a third boost to people in a way that is fast, ”Fauci said.
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