a lot of people in the u.s. thought we would get it after six months. good question. the plan for the roll out was at the september 20th, the week of september 20th. that would actually be about eight months from the time, the very first people in this country got their vaccinations in january. that s the issue. we said and we continue to abide by it that the ultimate implementation of that would be according to regulatory aspect of the fda and the recommendations of the acip. although the plan for eight months is still there, we re still planning to do that, they very well may be a range of time when the recommendations are being made. i don t think there s a situation that it s now immutable that we may not be able to change it. we are still planning for eight months. covid cases are at an unprecedented level among
merazzo, from the university of alabama birmingham. do you understand what the disconnect is? i wish i understood all of the details, but my take is this. we heard two and a half weeks ago from the white house in a very staged announcement, right? it was almost very theatrical that booster shots were going to be rolled out starting september 20th. and many people were rather surprised by that, including myself. first of all, because we really haven t seen all the data either from the pfizer vaccine or from israel, which is what the administration is apparently relying on a lot. second of all, that timeline would impose an incredible burden on both the fda and acip, the cdc s arm for discussing immunizations, to make it happen by then. and we know from the acip meeting that happened a few days ago that people are really
appear that way. what we re doing what the white house has done is saying we want to be prepared for a rollout but the system of making sure that we get the fda approval and the recommendation from the advisory committee and immunization practices to the cdc, they re not superseding that at all. they are preparing for the likelihood that we will be giving boosters to individuals and logistically we ll be starting it on the week of september the 20th. it will all depend on the proper approval by the fda and the recommendation by the acip. that has not changed. moderna says it submitted its dw data to the fda application to offer booster doses. do you think it s likely we ll see two vaccine makers approved to give these third doses because it s a sensitive subject because it looks and correct me
four weeks apart because we were in crisis, we were losing 3,000 american lives a day, we had to get everybody fully vaccinated. but when you do that kind of schedule, it almost guarantees that you will have waning immunity at some point. and that s the reason why it became a three-dose vaccine. the other piece, though, is we haven t seen whether we re really seeing breakthrough hospitalizations. yet we are seeing a lot of breakthrough infections, efficacy s declining from over 90% to 40 to 50%. do we need to see that decline in hospitalizations as well? or because of the longhaul covid that we are seeing among breakthrough unvaccinated cases. so the acip which met today only set aside a small amount of time for these questions. pfizer s just recently applied for it. so i think this will come up at the next acip meeting. pfizer today indicated that it will submit vaccine data for children ages 5 to 11 in