Dr Kavita Patel says need for Covid booster seems inevitable

Former Obama administration official Dr Kavita Patel told CNBC on Monday that she expects a Covid vaccine booster to be finally cleared by U.S. regulators due to newer more coronavirus variants. transmissible.

“With the threat of the delta variant and potentially other variants looming in the future, it seems inevitable that we need a recall,” Patel said on “Squawk Box.” “But that trillion dollar question is, when? It looks like six months might be too soon.”

The comments from Patel, who now works as a primary care physician in Washington, came before Pfizer representatives met with federal health officials on Monday to discuss the potential need for Covid booster vaccines.

Pfizer recently said it was developing a booster to combat the highly transmissible delta variant. In the announcement, the drugmaker cited internal data and a study in Israel that shows that people whose immunity wanes with the two-dose Pfizer vaccine six months after vaccination, as delta becomes the dominant variant in the country.

The company said a third dose of its existing vaccine could help boost immunity levels. In recent months, executives from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have said people will likely need a third dose of the vaccine within a year of being fully immunized.

Shortly after Pfizer’s announcement last week, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration issued a joint statement saying fully vaccinated Americans do not need boosters at this time.

This is a view shared by health experts such as Dr Ashish Jha, Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University. Jha told CNBC on Friday that he had “not seen any evidence yet that anyone needs a third shot.”

While Patel said the data indicates that the three Covid vaccines currently authorized in the United States – the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine – provide “more than enough immunity” to protect themselves against severe hospitalizations and death, she did not blame Pfizer for working on the recall.

“I think what we do know is that immunity, even for six months, wanes over time. The question is, over how long?” said Patel, who served as director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement in the Obama administration.

People shouldn’t be getting a third vaccine just yet, Patel warned.

“We’ve seen patients who have done it unintentionally, or even intentionally, and they’ve had even more dramatic side effects than the second shot. So I wouldn’t encourage anyone to do that,” Patel said.

If a booster is ultimately recommended by regulators, Patel said, people should expect the CDC to start issuing recommendations for certain populations, much like the initial vaccine rollout with a focus on high-risk populations. “It won’t be one, all come,” she said.

Patel said the conversation about booster injections in the United States must take into account the global impacts given the difficult rollout in other parts of the world.

“It’s not going to help the United States if the rest of the world isn’t vaccinated and they might have had the opportunity to have hundreds of millions of doses because we got a booster,” Patel said.