CNBC
On Friday, Andy Slavitt, senior advisor to President Joe Biden’s Covid response team, said the White House is preparing for the potential need for Covid-19 vaccine booster shots. He said the Biden administration has thought about the need to secure additional doses.
“I can assure you that when we do our planning, when the president orders purchases of additional vaccines as he has done and when we focus on all the production expansion opportunities that we talk about in here we very much have scenarios like that in mind,” he said at a White House press briefing.
Last week, the Biden administration’s Covid response chief science officer, David Kessler, said Americans should expect to receive booster shots to protect against coronavirus variants. He told U.S. lawmakers that currently authorized vaccines are highly protective but noted new variants could “challenge” the effectiveness of the shots.
“We don’t know everything at this moment,” he told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
“We are studying the durability of the antibody response,” he said. “It seems strong, but there is some waning of that, and no doubt the variants challenge … they make these vaccines work harder. So I think for planning purposes, planning purposes only, I think we should expect that we may have to boost.”
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel told CNBC last week that the company hopes to have a booster shot for its two-dose vaccine available in the fall.
This news originally appeared in CNBC.
