FDA Chief Medical Officer Hilary Marston explains the importance of getting a booster shot, considers why so few people have gotten them and answers other questions
As the weather gets chillier and people spend more time indoors, COVID is once again not-so-gently rapping at the door.
Scientific American spoke with Hilary Marston, chief medical officer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, about why booster uptake has been so abysmal, what we know about how effective the shots are and why it’s still so important to get one.Why are these boosters so crucial, and who is eligible for one right now?
Would I like to see the numbers higher? Absolutely. And I think any health care worker would and anybody who’s been following this pandemic very closely. As a health care worker, boy, I feel for those who are in the emergency rooms on the front lines. They’re going to be there to take care of you if you do get sick, of course, but it is just such a strain. And it is frustrating, because we have tools, we have more than we could have possibly hoped for at the beginning of this pandemic.
There is, for example, a higher risk of hospitalization and deaths than we see from influenza, and plenty of us are rushing out to get our kids vaccinated against the flu. So I would encourage parents to look at it as something that they should do, just as they would protect their children from flu. We were fortunate in this country to have access to these vaccines.
Absolutely. This is the single best thing that you can do to protect yourself against this virus. We have these vaccines widely available. People should be going out and taking advantage of this program. The risk is certainly higher in those populations. And we continue to see as we look at those folks who are hospitalized, who are dying from COVID, it is overwhelmingly people who have either not been vaccinated at all or have not been boosted.
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