It’s unclear to know exactly where America stands when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic. On one side, there is Joe Biden, who recently claimed that the pandemic was over. On the other side, companies like Pfizer and Moderna continue to crank out drugs surrounding COVID-19 and its numerous variants. Not to mention the Democrats and Biden administration urging for more funding to fight the virus. But while the Democrats and Joe Biden warn about the dangers of COVID-19, it seems that one vaccine expert and pediatric doctor recently suggested that parents should be extremely cautious when allowing their children to get the new booster shot.
Being both a member of the Food and Drug Administration Vaccine Advisory Committee and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, Dr. Paul Offit’s opinion carries a great deal of weight in the medical community. So when he decided to speak out against a third booster shot, people listened. He said on CNN, “A healthy young person is unlikely to benefit from a booster dose… If there’s not clear evidence of benefit, then it’s not fair to ask people to take a risk.”
The new dose being developed by companies like Moderna and Pfizer is a cocktail of several different drugs pertaining to the coronavirus. Called the “bivalent vaccine,” the drug is a mixture of omicron subvariants and the original COVID-19 strain. Experts believe that the new booster will help individuals fight off more mutations that might arise. Dr. Offit wrote for the Wall Street Journal [1]that the data wasn’t there to have the booster approved. When looking at Moderna’s bivalent test group, 11 people who received the drug caught COVID-19. For those who received the original COVID-19 drug, that number dropped to five.
It should also be noted that the data presented to the FDA didn’t include human testing, only trials on mice. “When you are asking people to get a vaccine, I think there has to be clear evidence of benefit. You’d like to have, at least, human data. Right now, they’re saying we should trust mouse data, and I don’t think that should ever be true.” He added, “If there’s not clear evidence of benefit, then it’s not fair, I think, to ask people to take a risk no matter how small.’
As mentioned above, Joe Biden recently announced that the pandemic was over. Taking part in an interview for 60 Minutes, the Democrats declared, “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it’s changing.”