As I was emphasizing amid the booster hype train...
www.nytimes.com
The Biden administration will only offer Covid-19 booster shots once federal health regulators offer their support, the White House chief of staff said on Sunday, reiterating a pledge from administration officials.
“I want to be absolutely clear,” Ron Klain, the chief of staff, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” news program. “No one’s going to get boosters until the F.D.A. says they’re approved, until the C.D.C. advisory committee makes a recommendation.”
The pledge followed a
report on Friday by The New York Times that top federal health officials had told the White House to scale back the planned booster campaign, arguing that regulators needed more time to collect and review all the necessary data.
In August, the Biden administration announced a plan
to start offering boosters the week of Sept. 20 to adults who had received their second shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine at least eight months earlier. In making the announcement, the administration said the plan was contingent on clearance from the Food and Drug Administration and recommendations from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee.
Some health experts have argued that before starting a booster program, the administration should push first to reach more unvaccinated Americans who have been stricken hardest by the highly contagious Delta variant in both hospitalizations and deaths.
Regulators are just beginning to review critical data that will help them determine how to proceed on the issue of boosters. Pfizer finished its booster application to the F.D.A. less than two weeks ago, and Moderna said on Friday that it had just completed its own.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on the CBS news program “Face the Nation” on Sunday that it was possible that only the Pfizer-BioNTech booster would be approved by Sept. 20. But he said that any delay in clearing the Moderna booster would be only a few weeks at most.