(CNN) — Americans may want to get vaccinated against COVID-19 every year, federal fitness officials said Tuesday, adding that the country will live with the coronavirus for the foreseeable future.
“This week marks a significant shift in our fight against the virus,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, who leads the White House COVID-19 Response Team. we continue to bring serious illness and death and Americans as fall and winter approach. “
While Tuesday’s announcement is not surprising, Biden’s management has been hinting at such a change since the spring, it’s a vital moment as the government continues to defuse its reaction to the pandemic.
Jha said the newly legal and updated Covid-19 boosters would be loose for everyone who qualifies and needs them, but vaccines and long-term remedies might not be enough as the investment for the pandemic reaction wanes and the government begins to shift the therapy to the advertising market. .
Vaccine experts have said the transfer to annual injections indicates that COVID-19 is going away.
“Our great-great-grandchildren will receive coronavirus vaccines,” said Dr. Gregory Poland, who heads the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic. “Like you and I, when we get our flu shot this fall, one of the parts we’ll get is derived from the 1918 pandemic flu virus, and more than a hundred years later, we’re still immune to it. “
Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor School of Medicine in Houston, said on Twitter that it might be the right time to move on to annual reminders if we can answer some key questions, such as updated information. plans working?
“What are you putting into next year’s plans?”Hotez tweeted: “What global tracking mechanisms do you want to put in place to identify early strains?
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Tuesday that while he expects this fall to be the start of annual injections for COVID-19, people with weakened immune systems may need more common protection.
“In the absence of a radically different variant, we are probably moving down a path with a vaccination rate similar to that of the annual flu vaccine, with annually updated COVID-19 injections corresponding to the strains circulating lately for the maximum population. “”He said.
Fauci said newer reinforcements continue to protect Americans as the coronavirus gradually changes, moving away from the lately circulating BA. 4 and BA. 5 subvariants.
He said the plan to administer annual injections may need to be reviewed if the coronavirus takes a significant evolutionary leap, as happened when the Omicron variant appeared around Thanksgiving. He compared this to a “curveball outside left field. “. “
“There’s nothing we can do about it, we know we have vaccine platforms that will allow us to act temporarily to solve this problem,” Fauci said.
But he noted that unless there are significant changes to the virus, updated boosters continue to be protected over the next year and may only be updated every year.
Tuesday’s announcement also marked a shift in the transmission of Covid-19 prevention.
“The biggest challenge with vaccines is that other people don’t get them,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, president of the medical branch at the University of California, San Francisco.
According to CDC data, about 1 in 3 Americans over the age of five have obtained a recall.
By making plans for the announcement, Wachter said, the White House and cdc hoped to stimulate more people through uncertainty about when they might want their next vaccines.
The overall goal, he said, is to make boosters more manageable by presenting them as anything you do every year, like getting a flu shot.
“I think it’s a wise way to change the name and rethink,” Wachter said.
At Tuesday’s briefing, Jha suggested Americans over the age of 12 take advantage of the updated boosters, noting that this was the first time the country had vaccines that matched variants in circulation lately.
He also said that other people get a flu shot at the same time as their Covid-19 vaccines.
“In fact, that’s why God gave us two arms, one for the flu vaccine and one for the covid vaccine,” Jha joked.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and PreventionIn the U. S. , he said that “the issue of being up to date with COVID-19 vaccines is clear. “
BA. 5 and BA. 4 are the dominant circulating variants of Covid, he said. Although hospitalizations have dropped by 14% since last week, there are more deaths now than in the spring.
“The seven-day average daily deaths are still too high: about 375 per day, well above the roughly two hundred deaths per day we saw in early spring and, in my opinion, too high for a preventable vaccine. disease,” Walensky said.
Fauci said his message to Americans “is simple: Update your COVID-19 vaccine as soon as you are eligible to protect yourself, your circle of family members, and your network from covid-19 this fall and winter. “
El-CNN-Wire™