No COVID-19 recall necessary “at this time”

Dr Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that Americans “for now” do not need a booster to protect against the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 – after Pfizer announced it was developing a third jab .

“Right now, given the data and information we have, we don’t need to give people a third push, a push, over and above the two doses you get with the mRNA and the dose. unique that you get with J&J, ”Fauci said. on CNN’s “State of the Union”.

Still, the White House’s chief medical adviser has left the door open to the possibility of recommending booster shots in the future as trials and studies of the extra dose continue.

“It’s not something we say, ‘No we don’t need a boost right now, the story is over forever.’ No, there’s a lot of work going on looking at that in real time, to see if we might need a boost, ”Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told host Jake Tapper when asked about Pfizer. recommend a third jab of his vaccine.

“But for now, given the data that the [Center for Disease Control] and [Food and Drug Administration] have, they don’t think we need to tell people right away that you need to be strengthened.

In another television appearance later Sunday morning, Fauci insisted there was no conflict between Pfizer and public health authorities over the potential use of a booster.

“Even though the CDC and the FDA have rightly said, right now we don’t think you need a recall, that doesn’t mean we aren’t very, very actively monitoring and bringing together all of these. information to see if and when we might need it, “Fauci said in” This Week With Stephanopoulos “on ABC.” And if and when we do, we’ll have everything in place to do it.

“So even though there seems to be a conflict here, there really isn’t one,” he added.

Fauci’s comments come as the rapidly spreading Delta variant – first found in India in December and for which some vaccines are less effective – now accounts for the majority of COVID-19 cases in the United States. According to the CDC, 51.7% of cases reported in the United States in the two weeks ending July 3 were related to the Delta variant.

In response, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said adding a third vaccine to the two-dose series of vaccinations could provide the “highest levels” of protection against all variants, including Delta.

“As the actual evidence released by Israel’s health ministry shows, the vaccine’s efficacy declined six months after vaccination, at the same time as the Delta variant becomes the dominant variant in the country,” the companies told CNBC Thursday. .

In Israel, Pfizer’s effectiveness against the virus has plummeted as the Delta variant spread across the country, data shows. The success rate of the pharmaceutical company’s vaccine to prevent both infection and symptomatic disease fell to 64% as of July 5 – down from the 95% protection it offered against the original strain of COVID-19, according to the Israeli Ministry of Health.