The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, said on Sunday that the US could decide in the next couple weeks whether to offer coronavirus booster shots to Americans this fall, The Associated Press reported.
Among the first to receive them could be health care workers, nursing home residents and other older Americans, said Collins.
He also pleaded anew for unvaccinated people to get their shots, calling them “sitting ducks” for a delta variant that is ravaging the country and showing little sign of letting up.
“This is going very steeply upward with no signs of having peaked out,” he said, according to AP.
Federal health officials have been actively looking at whether extra shots for the vaccinated may be needed as early as this fall, reviewing case numbers in the US “almost daily” as well as the situation in other countries such as Israel, which has been offering a coronavirus booster to people over 60 who were already vaccinated more than five months ago.
US health officials made clear Sunday they are preparing for the possibility that the time for boosters may come sooner than later.
“There is a concern that the vaccine may start to wane in its effectiveness,” Collins said. “And delta is a nasty one for us to try to deal with. The combination of those two means we may need boosters, maybe beginning first with health care providers, as well as people in nursing homes, and then gradually moving forward” with others, such as older Americans who were among the first to get vaccinations after they became available late last year.
On Friday, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory panel recommended additional shots of coronavirus vaccines for certain immunocompromised Americans.
The move came after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) late Thursday night authorized extra doses of the vaccines for people with organ transplants and those "diagnosed with conditions that are considered to have an equivalent level of immunocompromise."
The authorization is for people as young as 12 years old who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and people at least 18 years old for Moderna vaccines.
In addition to Israel’s booster shot campaign, Britain will also offer booster vaccines against COVID-19 to 32 million citizens starting early next month with up to 2,000 pharmacies set to deliver the program.
Germany has also announced it will start offering COVID-19 booster shots as of September.