The evidence is clear: COVID-19 booster shots work, particularly for seniors.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data on Thursday indicating that unvaccinated adults 65 or older who contracted COVID-19 between last October and last December were 49 times more likely to require hospitalization than seniors who had completed an initial inoculation regiment and received a booster shot.
“Meanwhile,” reports The Washington Post, “unvaccinated people between 50 and 64 years old were 44 times more likely to need hospitalization compared with their boosted counterparts.”
The New York Times adds:
That booster shots keep people from becoming infected, at least for a while, has not been in dispute. But the new finding largely supports conclusions from Israel and other countries showing that boosters also are effective at preventing severe illness and hospitalization, especially in older adults.
And the C.D.C.’s figures represent the first real-world data showing the effects of extra shots of a Covid vaccine in the United States.
More from USA Today:
Meanwhile, a group of international regulators published a report Friday saying it was becoming “increasingly clear that a booster dose is needed to extend vaccine protection,” especially as the omicron variant rapidly spreads.
However, the report said, “the administration of multiple booster doses at short intervals is not a sustainable approach in the longer term. There is a need to develop a long-term strategy on the types of vaccines needed to manage COVID-19 in the future.”
The regulators urged scientists to develop a new vaccine and to consider alternative approaches to monovalent vaccines, which contain a single strain of a single antigen rather than targeting multiple strains.
