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FDA Adviser Says Young And Healthy People Shouldn’t Get Latest COVID Boosters

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/fda-adviser-says-young-and-healthy-people-shouldnt-get-latest-covid-boosters_4980656.html
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2215780
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-01-11/bivalent-covid-boosters-offer-no-extra-protection-studies-suggest
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/stay-up-to-date.html
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total

A vaccine adviser to the Food and Drug Administration is questioning
whether young, healthy people should get new COVID-19 boosters,
arguing those shots should be used for older individuals.

“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,” wrote Dr.
Paul A. Offit, an FDA vaccine panel adviser and professor of
pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in New England
Journal of Medicine on Jan. 11.
A young woman receives a COVID-19 vaccine at the Bahrain International
Exhibition and Convention Center in Manama, Bahrain on Dec. 24, 2020.
(Mazen Mahdi/AFP via Getty Images)

In his article, Offit cited two studies suggesting that bivalent
boosters, which target the original COVID-19 strain and two Omicron
subvariants BA.4 and BA. 5, do not “elicit superior immune responses.”

“Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5
neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail?” he asked. “The
most likely explanation is imprinting. The immune systems of people
immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been
vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of
SARS-CoV-2. They therefore probably responded to epitopes shared by
BA.4 and BA.5 and the ancestral strain, rather than to new epitopes on
BA.4 and BA.5.”

Offit noted that based on those studies, “boosting with a bivalent
vaccine is likely to have a similar effect as boosting with a
monovalent vaccine” but stressed that “booster dosing is probably best
reserved for the people most likely to need protection against severe
disease.”

Another doctor appeared to agree with Offit’s conclusions regarding
“imprinting.” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns
Hopkins Center for Health Security, told U.S. News that “it may be
that people’s immune systems are so primed to respond to the ancestral
strain spike protein that a reformulated booster is unable to fully
stimulate the immune system because it has been ‘imprinted’ by the
original version of the virus.”
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Data and studies have shown that older adults and people who have
compromised immune systems are most at risk of developing severe
COVID-19 symptoms, hospitalization, and death. Children, meanwhile,
have long been shown to have the lowest chance of death,
hospitalization, or developing severe symptoms since the pandemic
started.

Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and FDA said
that everyone over the age of 6 months get updated boosters at least
two months after their last doses of the vaccine. The bivalent
boosters were authorized under emergency use for children aged 6
months to 4 years on Dec. 9.

Meanwhile, a small number of Americans have received the updated
boosters, according to the CDC. As of Jan. 4, some 15 percent of
individuals aged 5 and older received the bivalent shots, while about
38 percent of adults aged 65 and older have gotten them.

That same CDC data also shows that about 80.9 percent of all Americans
received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine since they were
rolled out two years ago, while 69 percent have completed their
initial, “primary series.”

An FDA spokesperson Abigail Capobianco responded to Offit’s article
this week, telling NBC News that Offit allegedly used “selective” data
to reach his conclusions and that “we strongly believe that the
totality of the available evidence continues to support the use of
these vaccines in all age groups.”

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