“We will have enough supply to ensure, if the F.D.A. decides that boosters are recommended for a portion of the population, to provide those as well,” Ms. Psaki added, noting efforts by the administration to send vaccine doses to other countries.
President Biden said on Tuesday that the United States had donated more than 110 million vaccine doses globally, a down payment on a pledge he made to send a half a billion doses of vaccine to poorer countries over the next year. Mr. Biden, who for months was under pressure to share vaccine doses, is now seeking to position his administration as a global leader in inoculating the rest of the world.
Deaths from Covid-19 have surged in African nations in recent months, while many health workers and elderly or vulnerable people in the region have remained entirely unprotected. The urgency of vaccinating more people globally has only grown as the Delta variant has spread widely; Delta is considerably more contagious than other variants, and may also cause more severe illness.
That made it unacceptable, Dr. Tedros said, for millions of unvaccinated people who cannot stay at home to have to go to work and be exposed to transmission, while people who are at less risk in wealthier nations are offered booster shots.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the United States and an adviser to Mr. Biden, said on Tuesday that in some cases, it takes more than the usual number of shots to completely vaccinate immunocompromised people.
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“Giving them an additional shot is almost not considered a booster, it’s considered part of what their original regimen should have been,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Many such patients, and “maybe most of them, have not gotten an adequate immune response to begin with,” he said.
That point was echoed by Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior W.H.O. adviser, who said at Wednesday’s briefing that for people like solid organ transplant patients, a third dose would be part of “their primary series” of treatment and not a booster.
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