The Administration’s broad effort last Wednesday to launch new initiatives to combat the pandemic received significant coverage, with the focus primarily on the announcement of the need for booster shots for those who previously received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. The President’s announcement that nursing home staff need to be vaccinated received moderate coverage.
The Los Angeles Times reports President Biden “accelerated federal efforts to combat the resurgent COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday, offering many Americans booster shots starting next month, requiring nursing home workers to be vaccinated and imploring private businesses to mandate inoculations for staff.” The Times says that Biden was “keeping his focus on his top domestic priority in a week dominated by a foreign policy crisis in Afghanistan.” The New York Times reports that the Administration “moved on multiple fronts” to “fight back” against the Delta variant. The “shifts in strategy reflect the administration’s growing concern that the highly contagious Delta variant is erasing its hard-fought progress against the pandemic and thrusting the nation back to the more precarious point it was at earlier in the year.”
The AP reports the plan, as outlined by the CDC “and other health agencies, calls for an extra dose eight months after people get their second shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. The doses could begin the week of Sept. 20.” CDC Director Walensky said, “Our plan is to protect the American people, to stay ahead of this virus.” Reuters reports the booster shots will first focus on “healthcare workers, nursing home residents and older people, among the first groups to be vaccinated in late 2020 and early 2021, top U.S. health officials said in a joint statement.” Roll Call reports the President said a booster “will make you safer and for longer.”
Politico reports Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said Wednesday, “The time to lay out a plan for Covid-19 boosters is now. Recent data make clear that protections against mild and moderate disease has decreased over time.” Bloomberg calls it a “massive expansion to a program previously limited to those with weakened immune systems.” CNN also reports on the booster shot announcement.
Politico reports that this is “the first time the White House has used the threat of holding back federal funding to boost vaccination rates and will impact roughly 15,000 nursing homes employing 1.3 million people. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid will issue an emergency regulation in September, making staff vaccination a condition of funding.” The Hill reports the President said, “With this announcement, I’m using the power of the federal government as a payer of health care costs to make sure we reduce those risks to our most vulnerable seniors. These steps are all about keeping people safe and out of harm’s way.”
Reuters reports the President “made the announcement hours after the release of a study showing that the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines for residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities…has dropped since the Delta variant became dominant in the United States.”
President tasks Education Department with combatting mask bans. The Wall Street Journal reports the President signed a memorandum that directs the Department of Education to use all available tools to make sure that students can return to school safely. Biden said, “We need to make sure children are wearing masks in school,” and he added that politicians opposing mask mandates are “setting a dangerous tone.” The Washington Post reports Education Secretary Cardona, “in a Wednesday post on the department’s Homeroom Blog, said the department can investigate any state educational agency whose policies or actions ‘may infringe on the rights of every student to access public education equally.’”
Politico reports that Biden, with the memo, “escalated a confrontation with Republican governors over school mask mandates.”
CDC studies show declining effectiveness in COVID-19 vaccines. The New York Times reports the CDC “released three studies on Wednesday that federal officials said provided evidence that booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines would be needed in the coming months.” According to the Times, “the studies show that although the vaccines remain highly effective against hospitalizations and deaths, the bulwark they provide against infection with the virus has weakened in the past few months.”
The Washington Post says that in one study, researchers “found a modest drop-in” vaccine effectiveness in New York state, “from 92 percent in May to 80 percent in late July.” Another study showed “effectiveness against infection declined for nursing home residents after delta emerged. It dropped from 75 percent in March through May to 53 percent in June and July.” A third study, “an analysis of patients at 21 hospitals in 18 states, found sustained protection against hospitalization. Effectiveness was steady at 86 percent, even in the midsummer months when delta outcompeted other variants of concern.” The Post adds that the “studies persuaded the Biden administration to develop a plan for additional doses to bolster the immune systems of people vaccinated months earlier.” Reuters (8/18, Renshaw, O’Donnell) also reports on the studies.
Questions raised about the ethics of boosters as the developing world remains short of doses. The announcement of booster shots drew questions about their necessity, along with the ethical impact, given the need for doses in the developing world. For example, Politico says the booster policy “has also sparked tensions inside and outside the administration, with some health experts arguing that available data does not show a clear-cut need to give additional doses to all adults – especially when large portions of the globe remain unvaccinated.” Bloomberg says the announcement “came without the FDA and CDC publicly saying they had fully vetted giving a third shot to the 100 million fully-vaccinated Americans by year’s end.” Axios says that “giving Americans third doses of the COVID-19 vaccines poses ethical concerns, given the vaccine shortages that plague many countries around the world. Uneven global distribution of the vaccines helped lead to the mutation of more dangerous variants in the first place, experts say.”
Reuters reports the WHO said Wednesday that the current data does not support the need for booster shots, “adding that the most vulnerable people worldwide should be fully vaccinated before high-income countries deploy a top-up.” WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said, “We believe clearly that the data today does not indicate that boosters are needed.” Still, Reuters reports separately that in recent weeks, several other countries have authorized boosters to some members of the population, including France and Germany.
Overall, the Washington Post reports that the plan for boosters “drew a mixed reaction from experts, with some praising the plan and others saying it was premature and could subvert the process for considering vaccines and boosters.”
CDC’s “slow and siloed” approach to data sharing hindered US response to delta variant, experts say
The Washington Post reports last month, when Pfizer told US health officials they believed COVID-19 booster shots would soon be necessary, the CDC “disagreed, saying their own data showed something quite different, according to four people with direct knowledge of the meeting.” Other top health officials at the meeting were “stunned,” and wondered why the CDC had not already shared the data. The CDC insisted it could not share the data, but would soon publish its findings. This “episode, say senior administration officials and outside experts, illustrates the growing frustration with the CDC’s slow and siloed approach to sharing data, which prevented officials across the government from getting real-time information about how the delta variant was bearing down on the United States and behaving with greater ferocity than earlier variants – an information gap they say stymied the response.”
From the news release of the American Association for Justice.
