• Moderna & Pfizer Booster Shots Will Be Available in September

• U.S. Will Require Nursing Home Employees To Get COVID-19 Vaccine(s)

• More Than One Million Doses Were Administered Over One 24-hour Period This Week

Moderna & Pfizer Booster Shots Will Be Available in September

The Biden Administration announced a nationwide booster shot plan this week which will start the week of September 20^th. US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy announced during a White House briefing that the first phase of boosters will commence for “our most vulnerable populations, like our health care providers, nursing home residents and other seniors. We will also begin delivering booster shots directly to residents of long-term care facilities."

People 18 years and older who received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines will be eligible for a booster dose eight months after their second dose. The booster shots will not be extended as of yet to those who received Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine because public health officials await trial results using two doses.

Although the initiative will still need to be authorized by the FDA and US CDC, the announcement comes afterthree new studies outlined in US CDC Morbidity & Mortality Reports appear to show the vaccines still appear to remain effective at preventing severe illness and hospitalization for most people.

However, Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA, an infectious disease specialist at NYU and a former member of the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board, questions such a broad plan for boosters stating, “I do not understand the urgency of giving the general population additional doses of COVID vaccine at this time,” and said boosters could be limited to vulnerable groups like people over 80. “[The vaccines] remain highly protective vs hospitalization & death.”

U.S. Will Require Nursing Home Employees To Get COVID-19 Vaccine(s)

President Joe Biden this week stated his administration will require employees at nursing homes to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of the facilities participating in the Medicare and Medicaid government health care programs. Governor Mills announced a statewide mandate for all health care workers last week.

The President and CEO of the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living responded by saying that focusing on nursing homes "will cause vaccine hesitant workers to flee to other healthcare providers" and "make an already difficult workforce shortage even worse."

The announcement came Wednesday, August 18, after a US CDC Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) presented a new study comparing weekly data from over 3,800 nursing homes and long-term care facilities spanning March 1 to May 9, before Delta became widespread, to data from nearly 15,000 facilities covering June 21 to Aug. 9, when the variant was responsible for the majority of new infections.

Researchers found that efficacy of the two-dose vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna for preventing any coronavirus infection — mild or severe — dropped from 74.7% to 53.1%. Effectiveness estimates were similar for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, they said.

US CDC August 18, 2021 MMWR: Effectiveness of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Vaccines in Preventing SARS-CoV-2 Infection Among Nursing Home Residents Before and During Widespread Circulation of the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant — National Healthcare Safety Network, March 1–August 1, 2021

More COVID Nursing Home News:

The Bangor Daily News reported this week that “Maine’s delta variant surge has largely spared nursing homes.”

More Than One Million Doses Were Administered Over One 24-hour Period This Week

According to White House figures, more than one million doses were administered in the past 24 hours, including half a million people with a first dose. It was also a 31 percent week-over week increase in the daily average of people completing their vaccine series.

Thursday’s announcement marks the first time there have been at least 1 million doses administered in close to seven weeks. Vaccinations had slowed down after hitting a peak in mid-April of about 3.3 million doses per day.

Full story from The Hill can be found here.