The outlook for COVID boosters has never been as uncertain with schools reopening, day cares filling up and respiratory virus season looming.
The big picture: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other vaccine critics atop the federal health bureaucracy have cast doubts on the safety of the mRNA shots, narrowed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations for who should get them and rejected broad approval of updated vaccines from Moderna and Novavax.
That could drive down already low uptake, even while the virus is surging in parts of the West and still killing people. No one knows how this fall will go given uncertainty over further approvals, the new restrictions and the partisan environment. One report suggested the Trump administration could soon remove COVID-19 vaccines from the market. Health and Human Services declined to comment.
Food and Drug Administration commissioner Marty Makary and top vaccine regulator Vinay Prasad wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in May that "the FDA will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk."
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