内容摘要：Health experts say there are legitimate questions about how much everyone still benefits from yearly COVID vaccination or whether they should be recommended only for people at increased risk.

Health experts say there are legitimate questions about how much everyone still benefits from yearly COVID vaccination or whether they should be recommended only for people at increased risk.

As the FDA’s top official overseeing vaccines, Prasad is now in position to reverse what he recently called “a number of missteps” in how the FDA assessed the benefits and risks of COVID-19 boosters.He questioned how much benefit yearly vaccinations continue to offer. In a podcast shortly before assuming his FDA job, Prasad suggested companies could study about 20,000 older adults in August or September to show if an updated vaccine prevented COVID-related hospitalizations.

There is “legitimate debate about who should be boosted, how frequently they should be boosted and the value of boosting low-risk individuals,” said Hopkins’ Adalja. But he stressed that CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has the proper expertise to be making those decisions.And other experts say simply updating the strain that a COVID-19 vaccine targets doesn’t make it a new product — and real-world data shows each fall’s update has offered benefit.“The data are clear and compelling” that vaccination reduces seniors’ risk of hospitalization and serious illness for four to six months, said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious disease researcher.

Nor could that kind of study be accomplished quickly enough to get millions of people vaccinated before the yearly winter surge, said Dr. Jesse Goodman of Georgetown University, a former FDA vaccine chief.“You’d always be doing clinical trials and you’d never have a vaccine that was up to date,” he said.

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