Doses of the COVID-19 vaccine at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Md. DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando.
While President Biden initially announced that COVID-19 boosters would be available by September 20, media reports suggested that the announcement caught FDA off guard.
White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci recently suggested in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the U.S. government is scaling back its booster plan for the broader public, but that FDA could authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine by September 20. The agency would authorize the Moderna vaccine afterward.
“The bottom line is very likely, at least part of the plan [to authorize mRNA boosters] will be implemented, but ultimately the entire plan will be,” Fauci said.
The U.S. will likely stick by its earlier plan to provide booster doses of mRNA vaccines eight months after administering the second dose. President Biden had recently suggested that the U.S. was considering boosters at five or six months.
The U.S. is conducting studies exploring the ramifications of providing mix-and-match schemes for mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.
In the interim, Fauci has advised that Moderna recipients should wait until FDA authorizes a booster dose of that vaccine.
Some 66 million people in the U.S. have received two doses of the Moderna vaccine, while 95 million have received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Filed Under: clinical trials, Infectious Disease
