Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director:
We know that among the things that we need to do as we’re planning a lot for booster shots is to really focus as well on the unvaccinated.
So I really do want to highlight that, while we are focusing on booster shots, we cannot take our eye off of making sure that people who are not yet vaccinated get vaccinated.
So let’s, like, say that, but also turn to the importance of the data that we are going to need to collect to understand who and when booster shots can and should be given.
We have — we at CDC, I’m really pleased and proud to say, have been following a group of cohorts of selected people across the country to follow the question of, how are our vaccines working? Now, we have many of these cohorts, tens of thousands of people, 4,000 health care workers that are getting a test every week, regardless of symptoms. That can tell us about asymptomatic spread.
We started to see that there was some waning with our vaccine effectiveness just with regard to infections. People weren’t getting that particularly sick yet, but just with regard to infections.
And that foreshadowed we may be seeing this soon with regard to hospitalizations and severe disease. And that’s really where we came together and said, as a country, as a government, we are planning for this. We know that this might happen. We’re starting to see the data that it might happen. And we are now planning for this.
