by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Thursday also recommended everyone 6 months and older get a flu shot.
Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday voted to again recommend the COVID-19 vaccines in 2024 for all people ages 6 months and older — despite concerns about recent safety signals, drastically reduced efficacy among a population with high immunity levels and rising costs.
CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) also recommended everyone 6 months and older get a flu shot.
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The CDC affirmed the recommendations, which will take effect as soon as the new vaccines from Moderna, Novavax and Pfizer become available, the agency said.
“Our top recommendation for protecting yourself and your loved ones from respiratory illness is to get vaccinated,” CDC Director Mandy Cohen said in a statement. “Make a plan now for you and your family to get both updated flu and COVID vaccines this fall, ahead of the respiratory virus season.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked vaccine manufacturers earlier this month to update the new COVID-19 shots to target the KP.2 variant if feasible, instead of the JN.1 lineage — which now reportedly accounts for only 4.4% of cases — the agency it had sought to target earlier, Reuters reported.
ACIP recommended the COVID-19 vaccines for most Americans, while also conceding the vaccines offer only a small boost in immunity that lasts for just a couple of months, given that most people have acquired immunity from infection or multiple vaccine doses.
After the COVID-19 working group made its presentation, committee member Dr. Sarah Long said the presentation made it seem that “this is not a great vaccine” and that the “summary slides are a little brighter than the data seemed to be.”
Long said it’s possible the results imply the vaccine “doesn’t have the kind of effectiveness we’d like to see if we give it to the entire population.” Or, she said, more people have partial protection from prior immunity or the vaccine.
That makes it difficult, she said, to tell “if more and more and more immunizations are going to be helpful.”
In particular, Long said, it was striking that COVID-19 hospitalizations were consistent across time, rather than seasonal, especially given that the vaccines’ effectiveness waned in just a couple of months.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., a research scientist at Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender, “That short-acting vaccination strategy would really only make sense if the disease were seasonal, where the population vaccinates right before the disease season.”
The committee reviewed data on 2023-2024 adverse events following immunization from the CDC’s analysis of its Vaccine Safety Datalink, which showed a safety signal for Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) associated with the Pfizer vaccine among people 65 and older.
There was also a signal for ischemic stroke with the Moderna vaccine for people 65 and older and for the Pfizer vaccine for people ages 50-64.
The committee said the GBS signal is “similar to what is considered acceptable” and more data would be needed to confirm whether the stroke signal indicated a real safety problem.
The presenter, the CDC’s Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, also said in the presentation that vaccine-related myocarditis, a known risk, resolved quickly.
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