Booster shots recommended for all

The United States will be rolling out booster shots from September 20 for all persons who have previously been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Though the vaccines are still protecting people from developing serious symptoms, new data shows that their effectiveness wanes over time.

This is far from an unexpected outcome. It’s common for a person’s antibody levels to decline over time after a vaccine is first administered, and that appears to be exactly what’s happening with the COVID-19 shots.

“Even though this new data affirms that vaccine protection remains high against the worst outcomes of COVID, we are concerned that this pattern of decline we are seeing will continue in the months ahead, which could lead to reduced protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death,” commented Surgeon General Vivek Murthy as the booster program was announced.

New Data

According to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the new data upon which the decision was based comes from three studies, the first of which included ten million New Yorkers and found vaccine effectiveness declined from 92% in May to 80% in later months.

The second was a Mayo Clinic analysis of the effectiveness of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in over 80,000 vaccinated and unvaccinated people, which found effectiveness declined from 76% to 42% for Pfizer and from 86% to 76% for Moderna.

The third study, from the National Healthcare Safety Network, analyzed 85,000 weekly reports from 14,900 nursing homes and found vaccine effectiveness declined from 75% to 53% between March and August.

“Importantly though, despite waning vaccine effectiveness against infection, data analyzed through July continued to demonstrate the stable and highly effective protection against severe illness and hospitalization for people who are vaccinated,” Walensky said.

“Included in the same reports described before, data from New York State and Mayo Clinic also show that vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization remains relatively high, both over time and during periods when the Delta variant was surging.”

“The available data make very clear that protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection begins to decrease over time following the initial doses of vaccination, and in association with the dominance of the Delta variant, we are starting to see evidence of reduced protection against mild and moderate disease,” reads a statement released by the CDC and attributed to numerous public health and medical experts from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The booster program will offer third shots to all Americans beginning the week of September 20. A booster dose will be available starting eight months after the person’ second dose was administered.

At this time, the rollout program applies only to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. While it is anticipated that booster shots will also be needed for the single-shot Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine, it was rolled out later than the Moderna and Pfizer and data on the need for a booster shot is still being collected.