The decision to recommend Covid-19 booster shots for people at occupational risk of infection was a “scientific close call,” US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Sunday.
Walensky recommended last week that six-month booster doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine go to people over 65 and people over 18 at high risk of severe disease because of underlying conditions such as cancer or diabetes.
Although the CDC’s vaccine advisers voted against recommending doses for people at high risk of infection because of their work or living conditions, Walensky went with the US Food and Drug Administration’s authorization including those people.
“And where there was some real scientific discussion and scientific close call was for those people who are at high risk … by virtue of where they live or where they work,” Walensky told CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday.
“And because of that close call, and because of all of the evidence we reviewed at the FDA and the CDC, I thought it was appropriate for those people to be eligible for boosters. So who are those people? People who live and work in high-risk settings. That includes people in homeless shelters, people in group homes, people in prisons. But, also, importantly, are people who work with vulnerable communities, so our healthcare workers, our teachers, our grocery workers, our public transportation employees,” she added.
That doesn’t yet include parents of children too young to be vaccinated.
“The recommendations were not intended for that population,” Walensky said. “It is really for people who are working all of the time with many different people who might be unvaccinated, might be at high risk, and really the vulnerable occupations like our healthcare workers, our teachers, our public transportation workers,” she added.
“Right now our recommendation is for these limited people in the population over 65, high-risk workers, high-risk occupations, as well as high risk by co-morbidities," she continued.
There’s little fear of causing dangerous side effects from adding that third dose, Walensky said.
“What I can tell you is so far in the 20,000 people we've looked at, the safety signals are exactly the same as what we have seen for the second dose. And we've vaccinated over 160 million people with mRNA vaccines in this country. We have an extraordinary amount of safety data," the CDC director.
