Dr Anthony Fauci says an additional Covid-19 booster shot will be recommended for previously vaccinated people with weakened immune systems.
He told NBC’s Today show on Thursday that he expected the booster recommendation to come “imminently”.
People have compromised immune systems for a variety of reasons, including organ transplants, cancer or other conditions. Any authorization for an additional booster shot would come from the Federal Drug Administration.
Fauci said for other vaccinated groups, such as the elderly, data was being collected to determine if or when their protection goes “below a critical level” and “that’s when you’re going to be hearing about the implementation of boosters” for others.
The nation’s top infectious disease expert said “at this moment, other than the immune-compromised, we’re not going to be giving boosters”.
Fauci says “inevitably there will be a time when we’ll have to get boosts” because ”no vaccine, at least not within this category, is going to have an indefinite amount of protection”.
Meanwhile, World Health Organization officials have said administering the booster shots when so many other countries have little to no access to vaccines is unethical. About 80% of the world’s vaccines have gone to high-income countries thus far.
“I understand the concern of all governments to protect their people from the Delta variant. But we cannot and we should not accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccine using even more of it while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected,” the director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said during a news conference broadcast earlier this month.
