Vaccine Expert Says Additional COVID Boosters Not Required For Young, Healthy People

A prominent vaccine expert on Wednesday said it might not be useful to require young and healthy Americans to get additional COVID-19 booster shots.

Dr. Paul A. Offit, an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine panel and professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said boosters should be saved for older people and those with preexisting health conditions who need protection against severe disease.

“In the meantime, I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later,” Offit wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Offit has been an adviser on vaccines to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA panel that recommends which vaccines should be authorized and for which groups.

In his essay, Offit cited two studies that showed bivalent boosters, which target both the original COVID strain and the newer BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants, don’t produce “superior immune responses” compared with monovalent COVID shots.