Conna Dewart
Special to Guthrie News Leader
Rochelle Walensky, Director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recommended that the vast majority of Americans should receive the updated COVID Omicron booster, expected to be available across the country by Labor Day.
The announcement, on Thursday, came as officials prepare for what is expected to be a dramatic increase in cases this coming winter. Epidemiologists have predicted that releasing the booster update now, rather than in mid-November as previously planned, might save between 7,500 and 18,000 lives.
This is also the first time that drug manufacturers have used mRNA technology in a publicly available COVID vaccine perfectly matching the current strain, the CDC reported.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the average life expectancy for all Americans dropped in 2020 and 2021, due to the pandemic. The University of Pennsylvania’s Immunology Department reports there still is an average of just less than 500 deaths per day across the country, four times the number of deaths from influenza. These numbers are expected to increase in the winter COVID surge.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Association authorized the use of these new boosters, and regulators suggested people wait at least two months between boosters.
However, several immunologists and members of an expert CDC panel expressed concerns to the New York Times that two months was too short of an interval. The Times reported that the scientists they interviewed recommended waiting four to six months after the last vaccine to get a booster but that they also understood the “rationale for giving Americans flexibility in choosing when to seek a new shot.”
Both the FDA and the CDC endorsed an updated booster for all people aged 12 and older who have received a first COVID vaccine, no matter how many additional boosters they have gotten to date.
It should be noted that the new boosters were authorized relying on human trials of a different booster that had been reformulated to defend against the BA.1 subvariant of Omicron. The new booster is designed to prevent the original Coronavirus, BA.5, and the current Omicron subvariant.