For Americans, more Covid shots are on the way, even as daily infections remain near pandemic lows and mortality from the virus continues to rise, leading many in the United States to rally to move away from the pandemic .
dr Peter Marks, who heads the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), making it the agency’s chief vaccine regulator, said during a conference call Tuesday that he believes all Americans will need a fourth shot this fall.
The remarks come on the same day that the FDA approved second booster doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine for all Americans age 50 and older and also approved immunocompromised individuals age 12 and older.
The move came as Covid cases and deaths continued to fall. America is averaging 31,090 cases per day, a flat number over the past week. Deaths are also declining in the US, with the nation recording an average of 802 per day, down 22 percent over the past seven days.
While America’s virus situation appears to be improving, the World Health Organization (WHO) is warning that the world suffered 45,000 Covid deaths last week, a 40 percent increase from the week, although much of that increase is due to a change in the way the organization operates is due numbers case numbers.
“It wouldn’t be surprising if people might need an additional booster shot in the fall, along with a more general booster campaign if that happens,” Marks told reporters.
“It may be that a decision will be made that instead of the vaccines that we currently have, which are called prototype virus vaccines, we move to a vaccine that is either against one of the variants or against something else.”
dr Peter Marks (pictured), the FDA’s top vaccines authority, said he expects all Americans will need a fourth shot of a COVID-19 vaccine this fall
The agency has scheduled an advisory committee meeting for April 6 to discuss the future of booster vaccinations in America, including the fourth shot and beyond.
Marks said a study from Israel found that the fourth dose reduced the risk of hospitalization or death from the virus, although other studies found it did little to protect younger adults — who in any case rarely face hospitalization or death from the virus exposed to virus.
Also, not all experts consider the injection necessary.
dr Anna Durbin is an international public health expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and has criticized Pfizer, Moderna and the White House’s insistence on rolling out COVID-19 booster shots before they are needed. She told ABC last week that she doesn’t think many Americans would benefit from additional recordings.
“In my opinion, very few, if any, people require a fourth dose,” she said.
In August, when the White House unveiled plans to roll out the first COVID-19 booster shots, Durbin was also a critic, telling there was little scientific support for the decision.
“In general, it’s too early to recommend a fourth dose, except for people with compromised immune systems,” said Dr. Paul Goepfert, a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told ABC.
The additional shots were approved in part due to fears of the BA.2 “stealth” variant gaining ground in the US
The CDC reports that Omicron’s more infectious BA.2 “Stealth” line (light pink) is now dominant in the US. The Omicron variant accounts for every single Covid case in the US
The strain, nicknamed for its ability to evade detection by some sequencing methods, is believed to be the most contagious version of Covid yet – but is just as mild as the BA.1 version of Omciron that swept the world last year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Tuesday that it now accounts for 55 percent of active Covid cases in the United States, taking the mantle of BA.1 as the nation’s dominant strain.
Overall, Omicron is still the dominant variant, making up every single case sequenced by the CDC, the agency reports.
There are fears this strain will cause another wave of cases in America, as has happened in other parts of the world in recent weeks.
The WHO has warned that the spike in cases in Europe, Africa and Asia in March, which reversed a month-long trend of falling cases, was just the beginning of the BA.2 surge.
This week, the organization reported that Covid deaths are beginning to rise around the world, although case numbers are trending downward again.
About 10 million new COVID-19 infections and more than 45,000 deaths were reported worldwide last week, after the number of deaths fell by 23 percent the week before.
The increase in reported deaths from 33,000 last week was mainly due to a change in accounting; The WHO noted that countries like Chile and the United States have changed their definition of COVID-19 deaths.
It also added more than 4,000 deaths from the state of Maharashtra in India last week, not initially included in the COVID-19 death toll, according to the WHO.
The WHO has repeatedly said that the number of COVID-19 cases is likely to grossly underestimate the prevalence of the coronavirus.
The agency has been warning countries in recent weeks against halting their sweeping testing and other surveillance measures, saying it would cripple efforts to closely track the spread of the virus.
“The data are becoming increasingly less representative, less timely and less robust,” the WHO said.
“This hampers our collective ability to track where the virus is, how it’s spreading, and how it’s evolving: information and analysis that remains critical to effectively ending the acute phase of the pandemic.”
