Dr. Anthony Fauci has a message for Americans who recently received COVID-19 vaccinations: Expect calls for booster shots down the line.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases made the comment during a Thursday broadcast of NBC’s “Today” program while discussing what citizens can expect on the pandemic front moving forward.
“Inevitably, there will come a time where we’ll have to get boosts” he said. “No vaccine, at least not within this category, is going to have an indefinite amount of protection.”
Dr. Fauci noted that health officials are currently focused on “immunocompromised” people before pivoting their attention back toward the rest of the population.
“What we’re doing, literally, on a weekly and monthly basis, is following cohorts of patients to determine if, when, and whom should get it,” the doctor added.
The interview with NBC’s Craig Melvin covered related issues before returning to the efficacy of vaccines.
“I want to go back to this efficacy question because there is this study, as you know, that’s out — not peer-reviewed, we should point out — but it shows that the Pfizer vaccine is less than 50% effective after six months,” Mr. Melvin said. “What do you make of that?”
“Yeah, I think what we need to do, Craig, is to get a lot of data, which is literally in real-time, even as we speak now — we’re doing that. There’s data from Pfizer. There’s data from Moderna. There’s Pfizer data from Israel. There’s Pfizer data from the United States. What the CDC is looking at, they have cohorts of patients. … If the data show, in fact, that the degree of protection has gone down below a critical level, that’s when you’re going to be hearing about the implementation of boosters.”
