There’s more demand for boosters than first shots of the COVID vaccine

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Hattie Pierce, 75, receives a Pfizer covid-19 vaccine booster shot from Dr. Tiffany Taliaferro at the Safeway on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Monday, October 4, 2021.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag

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Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag

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But some worry the focus on boosters has distracted from the more important goal of vaccinating the tens of millions of people who are eligible but still haven’t gotten vaccinated. As of Thursday, over 222 million Americans, or 67% of the population, had gotten at least their first shot.

The large number of unvaccinated people is the primary reason that more than 70,000 people are still catching the virus every day, many hospitals are still overwhelmed, and more than a thousand are still dying every day.

«I think it’s terrible,» says Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine and infectious disease researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. «If you look at the people over 12 who come into the intensive care unit at the hospital at the University of Pennsylvania, or the Children’s Hospital, they’re not in the intensive care unit because they didn’t get their third dose, they’re in the intensive care unit because haven’t gotten any doses.»

Offit calls the rush for extra shots «boostermania» — an unfounded panic triggered by the administration’s promise of boosters for all that feeds dangerous doubts about the vaccines.

«We need to vaccinate the unvaccinated, not boost the vaccinated,» he says.

Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, says she worries that the push for boosters just made it harder to convince the unvaccinated to finally roll up their sleeves.

«It made them think that perhaps they should just wait because perhaps a better vaccine would become available one day, that somehow we were still tinkering with the recipe,» she says.

The government must work harder to get vaccine to people who can’t take time off their jobs to get their shots, she says.

Offit would like even more vaccine mandates, such as like requiring people who want to fly domestically to get vaccinated first.

The latest CDC data shows that almost everyone who got the Pfizer or the Moderna vaccines originally are sticking with the same brand. But only about 18% of those who got the J&J went with that vaccine as a booster. That’s after research showed one of the mRNA vaccines seems to do a much better job pumping up the immune system.

While currently only certain categories of people deemed to be high risk can get a booster, federal officials are already hinting that they could broaden eligibility for boosters even more.