Dr. Anthony Fauci says he hopes that the coronavirus vaccine booster shots are potent enough that additional doses aren’t needed in the near future.
“We would hope, and this is something that we’re looking at very carefully, that the third shot … not only boosts you way up, but increases the durability so that you will not necessarily need it every six months or a year,” Fauci, who is President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” the New York Daily News reported. “We’re hoping it pushes it out more.”
The Food and Drug Administration has authorized booster shots for every American 18 and older who has received either of the two-dose Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccines at least six months ago. The recipients of single-dose Johnson & Johnson had already been cleared for boosters.
Fauci said the highly contagious delta variant has caused the rising number of coronavirus cases, deaths and hospitalizations.
“We’re dealing with the delta variant right now, which is very, very different from the original variants that we were dealing with before,” he said Sunday. “This is a virus that is highly, highly transmissible. The more people get infected, the more people that are going to get hospitalized; the more people that get hospitalized, the more people are going to die.”
As of Monday, roughly 18% of the U.S. population that is fully vaccinated has also received a booster dose, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.