Massachusetts infectious disease doctors say COVID-19 booster plan is too broad
Original article from The Boston Globe , 2021
The Biden administration’s plans to offer a third COVID-19 shot to Americans fully vaccinated with the two-shot regimen starting next month is premature and too broad, according to two Massachusetts infectious-diseases specialists who say the US should donate more doses to countries with low vaccination rates.
The doctors acknowledged that it’s likely the more than 155 million people who since December have received the two-dose vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna will eventually need booster shots because of waning immunity and the threat of the Delta variant.
But at this point, they said, boosters should go to a much narrower group. Federal regulators last week allowed Pfizer and Moderna to offer a third shot to certain immunocompromised people and are expected to start debating a rollout for most Americans later this month. For now, the doctors said, there’s insufficient evidence that anyone else needs boosters, except older patients and perhaps health care workers who have direct contact with people infected with COVID-19.
“We have an obligation ― both an ethical obligation and a medical obligation ― to more rapidly deploy the vaccines that we have to get it to countries that don’t have it,” said Dr. Shahin Lockman, a physician at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
President Biden said Wednesday the US has already donated 115 million vaccine doses to efforts abroad ― more than all other countries in the world have provided combined ― and has pledged to send more than 600 million vaccine doses to other countries.
“The United States government has done a phenomenal amount globally, but it’s still not sufficient,” Lockman said. She cited Africa, where only 2 percent of the continent’s 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated, and added that “the whole world urgently needs vaccine now.”