As cases of Covid-19 rise throughout the U.S, health officials are warning about an increasing number of fully vaccinated people being hospitalized or going to the ER. This concern about waning immunity against severe Covid infection comes as the FDA is expected to authorize a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine booster for all adults 18 and older.
“What we’re starting to see now is an uptick in hospitalizations among people who’ve been vaccinated, but not boosted,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, said Tuesday in an interview with NBC News. “It’s a significant proportion, but not the majority by any means.”
On Wednesday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported a decline in vaccine effectiveness among the elderly and residents of long-term care facilities, many of whom were the first to be eligible to be vaccinated last winter.
“Although the highest risk are those people who are unvaccinated, we are seeing an increase in emergency department visits among adults 65 and older, which are now again higher than they are for younger age groups,” Walensky said Wednesday during a White House Covid briefing.
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Walensky also pointed to new data on long-term care facilities from the agency’s National Healthcare Safety Network comparing rates of Covid disease between people who are vaccinated with two doses and those who have received an extra dose.
“The rate of disease is markedly lower for those who received their booster shot, demonstrating our boosters are working,” she said.
Both Fauci and Walensky stressed that the majority of hospitalizations and deaths are still occurring among unvaccinated people in the U.S.
“Studies show that those who are unvaccinated continue to be more likely to be infected, more likely to be in the hospital and more likely to have severe complications from Covid-19,” Walensky said during the briefing.
According to the CDC, the current seven-day rate of hospital admissions is about 5,300 per day and about 1,000 people in the U.S. are dying from Covid each day.
Still, it’s not clear how many breakthrough hospitalizations there are. Although the CDC has been tracking the rate of hospitalizations among fully vaccinated people, the agency’s website shows data only through Aug. 28. According to the latest from CDC, an unvaccinated person has an 11 times greater risk of dying from Covid compared to a vaccinated one.
The CDC didn’t respond to a request for new numbers.
At least 31 million people have received an extra dose of either a Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to the CDC.
Should younger adults get a booster dose?
Fauci points to data from Israel that shows a major improvement in protection in severe disease and hospitalizations in those who are boosted versus those who are not. In a study published in October, Israeli researchers found a 20-fold reduction in severe disease among those over 60 who received a booster.
Another October study from Israeli researchers and faculty from Harvard Medical School found that booster doses were 92 percent effective at preventing severe disease when compared to receiving a standard two dose regimen at least five months prior.
As vaccination rates increase in the U.S., it’s expected that there would be more vaccinated people who are hospitalized with Covid, simply because the vaccines aren’t 100 percent protective against severe illness, Fauci said.
“That’s where we get back to the importance of getting a boost,” Fauci said. “It will dramatically diminish the likelihood that if you do get infected with a breakthrough infection that you’ll wind up in the hospital.”
The U.S. is only starting to see “inklings” of waning protection against severe disease, according to Fauci — but throughout the pandemic Israel has been roughly six weeks ahead in Covid’s development, one reason federal health officials have relied on the country’s data.
“If you look strictly at the data from Israel, it’s very clear that the differences in immunity waning is much more profound in the elderly, but it goes across the board,” Fauci said, noting that, in particular, people over 40 who were boosted showed marked improvement in protection from severe disease.
Given the lack of national data on breakthrough illnesses among younger adults in the U.S., it’s unclear how many cases of severe disease there have been and whether boosters would provide a benefit.
“I wouldn’t be surprised that sooner or later, you’re going to see the data indicate that it’s also going to be very important for [younger] people, when they have boosters available, to get the booster shot,” Fauci said.
Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of University of California, San Francisco’s department of medicine, would like to see boosters expanded to all adults over the age of 18.
“It was reasonable to start boosting with people at the highest risk of a bad outcome, or the highest risk of exposure,” said Wachter. “However, we’ve sort of gone through that stage and there’s enough vaccine around.”
One of the biggest questions surrounding the booster dose was a potential risk of inflammation of the heart muscle, or myocarditis, that has been associated with the mRNA vaccines, especially in young males. Israeli health officials report that no significant signals of myocarditis have emerged yet, according to Fauci.
Along with the push for boosters, giving first doses to the unvaccinated is critically important, experts say.
Dr. Paul Sax, professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, believes that getting people their first dose and others boosted can absolutely happen at the same time.
“They’re separate processes and seem to be not in conflict with each other,” said Sax. “We can definitely do both because I think most of the people who are vaccinated would agree to a booster dose if it meant they’d be better protected.”
Sax is also strongly in favor of widening booster doses to include all adults over the age of 18.
“It’s inevitable and in my opinion the right move,” he said. “It does appear that two doses just isn’t sufficient.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
