Over the past week, there has been a lot of back and forth among experts on whether people need Covid booster shots, but the conversation lacks a crucial element.
On Wednesday, Pfizer sent data to the Food and Drug Administration from an actual study in Israel, which showed that a third dose of the mRNA vaccine given six months after a second shot restores protection against infection in the 95%. It seems like a solid statistic to justify booster distribution, but it omits a key point about vaccines: they are not intended to completely prevent infection.
Covid vaccines are doing exactly what they are designed to do, which is to prevent hospitalizations, serious infections, and deaths.
This is one of the possible reasons for the FDA’s rapid response to the Pfizer report. “[The] The FDA has not independently reviewed or verified the underlying data or its findings, “the agency wrote in a document released Wednesday. The FDA’s vaccine advisory committee will meet Sept. 17 to review the data and take a decision on whether to approve reinforcements fired in the US
In its report, the FDA also noted that the Israeli study presented by Pfizer is observational and therefore may contain biases that make the findings less reliable. Studies in the United States, the agency wrote, “may more accurately represent the effectiveness of the vaccine in the American population.”
Moderna also released new data Wednesday ahead of the FDA committee meeting, stating that advanced cases are less common in people who have recently received the vaccine, implying that their protection also decreases over time. The drug manufacturer’s analysis has not yet been peer-reviewed.
New data released last Friday reinforces the fact that vaccines continue to function as intended, even amid the spread of the most contagious delta variant. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied more than 600,000 cases of COVID-19 from April to mid-July, when the delta became dominant, and found that unvaccinated people were close to four and a half times more likely to contract Covid, more than 10 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 11 times more likely to die from the disease.
Over time, Covid vaccines may not work as well in preventing mild illness in vaccinated people, “but that’s not a sign that vaccines will fail,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, director of the Research Center at Immunization of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said during a briefing Wednesday.
That’s why a group of experts on Monday published a publication in the medical journal The Lancet, arguing that Covid’s boosters “are not appropriate at this stage of the pandemic.”
Even if the FDA approves the use of reinforcements, considering them safe and effective for doing what they are supposed to do, it is up to the CDC to review, officially sign and decide who should get them, Durbin said.
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