The United States is seeing a sudden rise in new COVID infections daily, with the average having risen to 56,000 in July compared to about 12,000 in June, causing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to scramble to establish new COVID guidelines in the face of the spike. Currently, the U.S. has fully vaccinated 49.7% of its entire population or 163 million people.
Now, the government is trying to encourage more people to get vaccinated while health authorities say that those who have had their shots need a third "booster" shot.
The sudden rise in new COVID infections have led some health authorities to believe that the vaccines are not as effective as the manufacturers claimed it was, especially in the face of the new delta variant that is reportedly more contagious.
According to the Wall Street Journal, BioNTech's chief executive Ugur Sahin admitted that immunity against COVID is decreasing among fully vaccinated individuals who got two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, because of the delta variant, as evidenced by data gathered from Israel.
"The antibody titers are going down," Dr. Sahin announced, citing the unit of measurement of antibodies that fight the coronavirus. "The vaccine protection against the new variant is considerably lower."
Data showed that antibody levels were decreasing seven months into immunization among some fully vaccinated individuals. But Dr. Sahin said that most of them will still be protected against severe disease and may opt out of a third dose. Because of these findings, however, governments and health officials are now pondering whether to provide a third shot for those who have been fully vaccinated.
Reuters reported that according to National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Dr. Anthony Fauci, "If there's going to be a third booster, which might likely happen, [it] would be among first the vulnerable."
The controversial White House public health adviser defined "the vulnerable" as "transplant patients, cancer chemotherapy, auto-immune diseases, that are on immunosuppressant regimens," among others. He added that the decision to offer the booster shot is a "work in progress, it evolves like in so many other areas of the pandemic" and insisted that they have to "look at the data" first.
According to CBN News, however, some health officials have lost faith in the CDC for failing to anticipate the spread of COVID's delta variant. Scott Gottlieb, who formerly led the FDA, recently took to Twitter to criticize the CDC for its attempt at modeling the trajectory of the COVID-19 Delta variant, calling it "deeply disappointing and not actionable."
He argued that the "huge variance in the estimates" heavily implied that the CDC "doesn't know how to model this wave, and has little practical idea whether we're at beginning, middle, or end."
Gottlieb, a medical doctor, also argued that the CDC had a "retrospective mindset," some kind of a "symptom of a more systemic bureaucratic disease." He accused the organization of not being a "prospectively-minded agency" and accused them of failing to "do horizon scanning, make predictions and tie to policy recommendations, coordinate heavy lift capabilities like vaccination campaigns, engage in risk estimates, or collect intelligence on foreign areas of concern."
