New York Daily News: By Shant Shahrigian – Elderly people will likely need booster shots for COVID vaccines, the nation’s top infectious disease expert said Sunday.

The level of protection vaccines provide against the virus goes down over time, Dr Anthony Fauci explained, citing the Pfizer drug as an example.

The Pfizer vaccine starts out about 90% effective against COVID, he said, going down to about 84 percent several months afterwards. Effectiveness of the Moderna vaccine has not yet been shown to decrease, he added, but Fauci expects that to happen eventually.

“Sooner or later, you’re going to see an attenuation to the point where we’re going to have to give an additional boost to people, very likely the elderly, before you give it to otherwise normal people who are not old,” Fauci told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That’s going to happen as soon as the data gets to us.”

People with compromised immune systems will likely need booster shots, too, he added.

“If you’re a person who has an immune compromise, transplant, cancer chemotherapy, immunosuppressive therapy, you likely never got a good response to begin with,” Fauci said. “So it isn’t that the durability of the response went down. For those individuals, I am strongly in favor of getting them that additional shot as soon as possible.”

The Food and Drug Administration has been working on a strategy for boosters, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (Susan Walsh/AP Photo)

The FDA’s plan will reportedly lay out who needs boosters and when they should get them. It’s expected early next month.

Meanwhile, Pfizer is planning to seek federal authorization for booster shots.

Roughly half the country — about 165 million people — have been vaccinated, according to the federal government.

Coronavirus vaccinations around the world

Berlin, Germany

Many countries have started to administer coronavirus vaccines to their citizens as COVID-19 cases top 132 million worldwide.

Last week, the head of the World Health Organization called for a moratorium on booster shots until at least the end of September, saying that would help make sure countries with low vaccination rates get their fair share of shots.“I understand the concern of all governments to protect their people from the delta variant. But we cannot accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it,” said the WHO’s Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Shant Shahrigian is a regular contributor to the Daily News. He was previously a staff politics reporter and an assistant city editor for the paper, and has also worked for outlets from the hyperlocal Riverdale Press to Germany’s international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle.