Biden Covid team sees vaccine effectiveness decline in unpublished data from Israel

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The White House and senior health officials said in mid-August that they plan to roll out the vaccines to most adults from September 20.

Pressure from the Biden administration to roll out coronavirus vaccine boosters this month has been largely shaped by unpublished data from Israel’s vaccination campaign, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Israeli data, which is expected to be made public as early as this week, shows that the ability of the Pfizer vaccine to prevent serious illness and hospitalizations declines over time, as does the vaccine’s protection against mild and moderate illness, the two said. sources. The country began administering reminders to people over 60 in July and has now extended them to people over 30, but has so far released relatively little information on the campaign’s effect. reminder.

The Biden administration has long relied on data from Israel, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, to inform its Covid-19 response. Senior officials from the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration analyzed the latest Israeli data for weeks, concluding that the United States should start giving boosters this fall, said a another senior administration official.

Although the CDC has released a series of targeted studies that suggest that the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines against infection is declining, especially in the elderly, Israeli data is more comprehensive and more alarming, it said on Monday. POLITICO three sources who reviewed the data.

The administration’s focus on Israel data underscores how much the United States is relying on the experiences of other countries to predict the next phase of the pandemic here. This is partly because the highly contagious Delta variant swept other parts of the world first, and partly because of better data tracking in countries like Israel that have national health systems. The United States continues to struggle to collect and analyze reliable Covid-19 data because the federal government has long neglected the country’s public health infrastructure.

Senior administration officials working on the federal government’s response to the pandemic have debated for weeks whether to recommend booster shots for Americans. The White House and senior health officials said in mid-August that they plan to roll out the injections to most adults from September 20. The move sparked tensions between Biden’s top aides, the CDC and the FDA, amid questions of whether the data supported the goal. Two senior FDA vaccine scientists leaving the agency co-authored an analysis published in The Lancet Monday that found no evidence to support the administration of booster vaccines to the general population.

The FDA is examining Israeli data as it examines requests from vaccine makers to offer booster shots, three other senior administration officials said. One official pointed out that no matter what national or international vaccine data says, the final decision on whether or not to recommend recalls rests with the FDA. The agency’s vaccine advisory committee is scheduled to meet on Friday to discuss Pfizer’s request for approval of its recall.

Asked to what extent Israeli data showed a decrease in vaccine effectiveness, Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci said it was “enough to make you impressed.”

“I would be very surprised if the US data ultimately did not turn out to be very similar to the Israeli data,” Fauci told POLITICO.

The CDC has released a series of studies on vaccine effectiveness in the United States, focusing on the performance of injections after Delta became dominant this summer. The results suggest that the available vaccines still offer strong protection against serious illness for most age groups, and that breakthrough infections are still extremely rare. But studies also show that injections are less effective at preventing Delta infection than against older strains.

A CDC study released last week found that the ability of vaccines to prevent infections – including mild illnesses – declined from 91% to 78% after Delta took control this summer. The study included data on 600,000 Covid-19 infections from April to mid-July and compared the relative risks of infection, hospitalization and death by age and vaccination status.

“If you look at it from the point of view of trying to stay ahead of what could be increased suffering and death before it actually happens… and then you see this data from Israel. , and the suggestion of our own data, we thought we needed less to plan and be prepared to give people a third boost in immunization doses in a quick manner, ”said Fauci.