What's the U.S. Plan for Updated COVID Vaccine Boosters?

While the U.S. may have led the charge to develop and deploy COVID vaccines, our efforts to get and stay fully vaccinated have not gone well. As the two-year anniversary of the country’s vaccine rollout fast approaches, the U.S. pandemic response seems stuck at a standstill while the coronavirus keeps adapting and spreading at a startling pace. The U.S. booster-shot drive has been a confusing mess from the start, and as of now, far too many Americans who are eligible for either their first or second booster have not gotten them, weakening the country’s wall of immunity that has so far prevented a big wave of hospitalizations and deaths despite a surge of new cases from more transmissible Omicron subvariants like BA.5. Increasing booster uptake, and expanding the protection those boosters offer by tweaking them for the new variants, is one way to reinforce the wall.