President Biden announced this week that booster shots will be available starting in September and encouraged Americans to receive a new injection eight months after their second shot. “It will be easy,” he said.
But not all scientists believe it was the right call and sound the alarm about what they believe was a “rushed” ad based on weak evidence, “Kaiser Health News reports.
For statesmen, the message about the effectiveness of vaccines has completely changed.
“I think we scared people,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital Vaccine Education Center and advisor to the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration.
“We sent a terrible message,” he said. “We just sent a message that people who consider themselves fully vaccinated were not completely vaccinated. And that’s the wrong message, because it’s protected against serious disease.” […]
“I certainly think the federal government is just trying to stay ahead of the curve,” said Dr. Joshua Barocas, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado. But, he said, “I haven’t seen solid data yet to suggest that it’s better to empower Americans who have gotten two vaccines than to invest resources and time to vaccinate unvaccinated people around the world.” (KHN)
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just over half of the U.S. population is completely vaccinated.
Some scientists also expressed concern about the perception of what vaccines are intended to do.
“They are not a force field. They do not repel the virus from your body. They train your immune system to respond when you get infected … with the goal of keeping you out of the hospital, ”Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told KHN.
“It’s like we’re committed to friendly fire against these vaccines,” he added. “What are we trying to do here? Are we trying to reduce global transmission? Because there is no evidence that they will. “
In addition, there is strong evidence that two doses are still highly effective.
Study from the New England Journal of Medicine: Vaccines are still extremely effective against covid-19 after two doses. pic.twitter.com/xruvu8gHLH
– Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 20, 2021
Fauci highlighted data showing that antibody levels decrease over time and that higher antibody levels are associated with greater vaccine efficacy. But antibodies are only one component of the body’s defense mechanisms against infection.
When antibodies decrease, the body compensates with a cellular immune response. “A person who has lost antibodies is not necessarily fully susceptible to infection, because that person has immunity to T cells that we cannot easily measure,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who is at the FDA Vaccine Advisory Panel.
John Wherry, director of the Penn Institute of Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania, recently published a study that found that two-dose vaccines elicited a strong T-cell response in the immune system, which researchers said which could be a more lasting source of protection. Wherry is working on a second study based on six months of data.
“We see very good durability of at least some components of the non-antibody responses generated by vaccines,” he said.
To protect yourself from serious illness, “really all you need is immune memory, and these vaccines induce immune memory and immune memory tends to have a longer life,” Offit said. Federal scientists are also studying the response of T cells, Fauci said. (KHN)
In addition, scientists told KHN that the Biden administration jumped the gun on the ad.
[Biden’s plan for boosters] it does not yet have the blessing of a CDC advisory panel and the FDA has not authorized reinforcements for all adults. […]
Typically, any distribution of traits would occur after the CDC Immunization Practices Advisory Committee developed recommendations. But with the Biden administration’s announcement about the boosters, public health experts worry because the message suggests the outcome is pre-ordered.
“They have been left with no choice,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, a former senior health and human services official in the Obama administration and US director of the Coalition for Preparations for the Innovation Epidemic. World Association Against Epidemic Vaccines “If there is no enforcement program, the FDA is to blame and that is not appropriate.” (KHN)
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, has argued that “if you wait to see real problems start, you’ve waited too long” and said they “want to move forward.”
However, not all scientists are convinced.
Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, told The Washington Post that the ad “makes no sense to me.”
“I think it’s very premature because science doesn’t say we need reinforcement right now. It could take a year or two, depending on the data, “he added.