The World Health Organization is calling for a moratorium on booster shots of coronavirus vaccines through at least September as poorer countries struggle to access the shots, even for high-risk populations such as health-care workers and the elderly.
“We cannot and we should not accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a Wednesday news conference.
He said the world is not on track to meet the health organization’s previously stated goal of 10 percent vaccination coverage in every country by the end of September.
As the coronavirus continues to infect and kill at alarming rates across the Global South, where vaccination levels remain catastrophically low, the decision by wealthy countries to give booster shots to their own people rather than donating those doses to poorer nations is highly controversial.
Advocates and experts, including at the World Health Organization, have called the move immoral.
The small but growing group that is planning additional shots for the fully immunized includes some of Europe’s richest and most populous countries, possibly setting a precedent and marking a new phase of the vaccination campaign. WHO officials said Wednesday that they want to urge countries considering the use of booster shots to hold off.
More than 80 percent of vaccine doses globally have gone to high and upper-middle income countries that represent less than half of the world’s population, Tedros said Wednesday. He urged “concrete” commitments to global vaccination goals and said that leaders of the G-20 countries, which include the United States, where nearly half the population is fully vaccinated, will determine the course of the pandemic.
“We need everyone’s cooperation,” he said.
Federal officials in the United States say that booster shots are not needed yet. But some anxious patients are nonetheless trying to get them, either by asking a health care provider willing to prescribe an extra shot, or by lying about their earlier vaccination.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is just starting to track data about unauthorized booster shots, Director Rochelle Walensky said Monday. She said the government can discern the difference between second and third shots, and is encouraging people to report safety outcomes if they receive boosters, though they are not recommended.
Many vaccination sites, including those at Walgreens and CVS, have explicit policies not to give additional shots to people who have been fully vaccinated. But they may not always be checking to ensure that that’s the case.
When patients arrive at vaccination sites, they usually have to fill out a consent form that asks whether they have been vaccinated before. In an ideal world, vaccinators would check the information on those forms against state vaccine registries to validate that patients are telling the truth. However, Aetna said that based on current guidelines from the CDC, the insurer does not cover additional Covid-19 shots for fully vaccinated patients.
If providers do catch patients trying to get booster shots, it could be an opportunity for a conversation about current recommendations as opposed to a situation that would escalate.
“People are frightened, and they are not sure what to do,” Coyle said. “There are so many reasons why someone would be motivated to seek an additional shot and it’s hard to catch all of those, so registries can be leveraged to ask questions.”
Aside from just presenting at a vaccination site, patients can have conversations with their doctor about prescribing a third shot outside of the FDA’s authorization. Mount Sinai Health System said it does not endorse prescribing booster shots, and said any providers administering extra doses will receive a notice and will have to fill out extra paperwork to help collect safety data.
The Mayo Clinic, University of Washington Medicine, and Wellforce Health System are also not providing booster shots, spokespeople said. AMA President Gerald Harmon said in an email that the group supports the FDA and CDC position as well