A new Covid vaccine will be released next month, but health experts and analysts believe it will likely receive a cold reception from the American public, even as hospitalizations for the Eris subvariant, which belongs to the Omicron variant, have been rising throughout United States.
Experts hope that Americans will adopt the new vaccine like the flu shot. But demand for the vaccine has plummeted since 2021, when it was first released. At that time, 240 million Americans, 73% of the population, had been vaccinated with at least one dose.
In the fall of 2022, when most people had either contracted the disease or had previously been vaccinated, fewer than 50 million people were vaccinated.
Health organizations and pharmacies in the US will start stocking next month the updated vaccine to treat the Eris subtype that has been dominant since last year.
They will be faced with waning public concern about the virus, fatigue and skepticism about its usefulness, says Kaiser Family Foundation Director of Survey Methodology Ashley Kirzinger.
"If health officials want to achieve annual vaccination of the majority of adults, they will have to explain to the American public that Covid is not over and that it threatens them," he says.
The main explanation put forward this year in public opinion surveys by people who skipped annual vaccinations was that they believed they were protected against the virus because of previous doses.
Like the flu shot
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the end of the pandemic in May, and the US government turned the work of vaccination over to the private sector. More than 1,1 million people have died in the US from Covid, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
CDC Director Maddy Cohen said last week on a podcast that she expects the vaccines, which must receive FDA clearance and CDC approval, to be available in the third or fourth week of September and advised Americans to treat them as a protective measure that should be administered annually along with the flu shot.
As with the flu, Pfizer/BioNTech SE, Moderna and Novavax have made updated Covid vaccines that will deal with the variant that will be released this fall. The new vaccines address the XBB.1.5 subvariant, similar to EG.5, and belongs to the dominant Omicron variant.
U.S. hospitalizations are up 40 percent from June, but are still 90 percent below their peak level in January 2022, when the Omicron outbreak erupted, according to CDC data.
Targeted vaccination?
Some doctors recommend that vaccines target the elderly and high-risk individuals.
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University and a liaison to the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said the committee is likely to make a looser recommendation in favor of vaccinating younger, healthier people.
“Should children get this booster? Should the average person without an underlying disease in the younger adult category get this vaccine now, or should this vaccine be more targeted?
Last year, the CDC recommended that children 6 and older receive one dose of last year's updated vaccine.
Dr. David Bulwer, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota, said that according to research he has published, people who have received a booster dose show less severe symptoms and for a shorter period of time.
"When you're looking for what to do to limit the duration of the disease, even getting sick, booster vaccination is the best way to do it," he said.
Source: RES-EAP