Headline Roundup • September 4th, 2021
Perspectives: Biden's Booster Shot Plan
Summary from the AllSides News Team
President Biden announced in August that his administration would begin offering a third “booster” shot to Americans eight months after their second dose of a Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine starting on Sept. 20. Since the FDA has already authorized certain immunocompromised people to get their third dose, Biden's plan prioritizes older people and health care workers. Many leading health officials have been apprehensive about the White House's premature decision to weigh in on unproven COVID-19 treatments. On Thursday, the respective leaders of the FDA and CDC told White House pandemic coordinator Jeffrey Zients that they might only be able to approve the vaccine produced by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech for "a subset of non-immunocompromised people" in the next several weeks. The U.S. is still waiting for data from other countries around the world like Israel, which began promoting booster shots for individuals 12 and older on Aug. 29.
The majority of voices across the spectrum seemed to agree that the Biden administration has put pressure on the FDA to approve booster shots. Left-rated outlets, which have generally been more critical of Biden since his Afghanistan "debacle," were more likely to take the stance that COVID-19 vaccines and subsequent boosters provide "extraordinary protection" against serious illness or death. Some right-rated outlets highlighted how shifting the public's attention towards booster shots "may send the wrong message about vaccines."
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The U.S. is poised to begin rolling out booster shots in a matter of weeks, with still one major sticking point to resolve: It's not entirely clear yet that third shots are needed.
President Joe Biden recently vowed to begin deploying boosters the week of Sept. 20, pending a green light from federal regulators.
But health experts advising the government on that decision say the August announcement by Biden's political appointees came as somewhat of a surprise. It also was unclear, they said, why that date was chosen at all.
Evidence for boosters is still mixed, and announcing a...
Covid vaccines can make for strange bedfellows, and raise your hand if you thought the Biden White House would be accused of ignoring the science? We didn’t think so. But that’s been the charge as two Food and Drug Administration regulators have resigned amid what media leaks claim is too much political agitation for Covid vaccine booster shots.
Count us with the White House on this one. Mounting evidence shows that vaccine efficacy wanes over time as Covid antibodies do, especially for older folks, and that the vaccines are less...
Last month, the Biden administration announced a plan to begin administering third shots of the two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to healthy people in mid-September to shore up potentially flagging immunity to the coronavirus.
But many scientists say that given the available evidence, which shows the two-dose vaccines still provide formidable protection against severe disease, it’s not yet clear that boosters are needed.
“What we expected from this vaccine is that we wanted it to protect against severe disease and the kind of disease that caused you to go to the...
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