A number of vaccine experts are warning that the U.S. may be sleepwalking into a policy of recommending annual COVID-19 booster injections without having any evidence to show they are actually needed.
The U.S. appears to be headed toward a policy of annual boosters as a sort of default position, not one arrived at by careful scrutiny of the evidence.
“It’s alarming that there hasn’t been organization around these vital questions, so that we can actually answer them in a very enlightened and data-driven and knowledgeable manner,” said Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the FDA who is now a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“It’s so reactive,” Borio said during a briefing for journalists. “And we know that this just snowballs. And we end up being stuck with decisions that don’t really make sense.”
“The only question was what were we going to boost with, not whether we were going to boost,” said Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel.