Fauci: Fully Vaccinated Americans May Not ‘Necessarily’ Need COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Shots

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks to members of Congress during a hearing in Washington on March 18, 2021. Susan Walsh/Pool/Getty Images

Fully vaccinated Americans may not need to get a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot, Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Friday in an interview on CBS' “This Morning.”

Fauci, who is head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said that there was “some misunderstanding” about whether fully vaccinated people would need a booster shot six months after getting injected.

“We are planning for the eventuality that we might need to boost people, we don’t know whether we will have to do it and when we will have to do it,” Fauci said.

“There’s estimates well it may be here, it may be a little bit longer. The fact is we don’t know, but it would really be foolish not to plan for the possibility that we might have to boost people, but there’s no set rule now that says in six months or in a year we’re going to get, we’re going to require a boost,” he added.

However, when asked two days earlier how soon fully vaccinated people would need a COVID-19 booster shot, Fauci told Axios Co-founder Mike Allen that Americans would need it.

“Well, we don’t know exactly when that will be Mike, but I believe it likely would be within a year,” said Fauci. “We know that the vaccine durability of the efficacy lasts at least six months and likely considerably more, but I think we will almost certainly require a booster sometime within a year or so after getting the primary [injection].”

Bottles of the three current COVID-19 vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer, with hypodermics needles, photographed at the COVID-19 vaccination site at Kedren Community Health Center, in Los Angeles, Calif., on May 13, 2021. Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service

Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive officer, also said in an interview that the data from Pfizer’s clinical trials supports “the notion that likely there will be a need for a booster somewhere between 8 and 12 months.”

Scientists still do not know how long the COVID-19 vaccines will confer immunity but data suggests that the vaccines should provide up to six months of immunity. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

All three COVID-19 vaccines granted emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration have yet to be approved by the drug regulator as the vaccine manufacturers continue to gather safety and efficacy data from their Phase 3 trials.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it has received 9,245 breakthrough cases out of the 95 million people who were fully vaccinated as of April 26. However, the actual number is higher since the federal agency relies on “voluntary reporting from state health departments.” Breakthrough cases occur when a fully vaccinated person still contracts COVID-19.

The CDC announced that it will change how it reports breakthrough cases from “monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only vaccine breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization or death.”

For people who have recovered from COVID-19, a study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that many of the participants developed a strong immunity against the disease for up to eight months after infection. Some doctors have shared on social media that they still had antibodies a year after they were infected with the CCP virus.

According to the CDC, more than 126 million people in the United States are fully vaccinated, representing 38.1 percent of the U.S. population.