“Just over this past weekend at pharmacies alone, over 400,000 Americans received the additional protection of a booster, and almost 1 million people have already scheduled their booster shots through pharmacies over the coming weeks,” Zients said at a press briefing.
On Monday, US President Joe Biden received his COVID-19 booster shot in a live broadcast from the White House and said the relevant US health agencies have determined that the injection was “safe and effective.”
As of today, only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be used as a booster vaccine against COVID-19. The other two manufacturers, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, have submitted their data to FDA for evaluation.
On Thursday, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its recommendation with regard to booster shots against the novel coronavirus. The Committee recommended the boosters for millions of Americans who are at risk for getting a serious disease due to underlying health conditions but excluded frontline workers from it. The CDC’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, overruled the decision and made the workers at risk, including healthcare workers and teachers, eligible for getting a booster shot.