US mulls COVID vaccine boosters for elderly as early as fall

Warning of tough days ahead with surging COVID-19 infections, the director of the National Institutes of Health says the U.S. could decide in the next couple weeks whether to offer coronavirus booster shots to more Americans this fall

WASHINGTON -- Warning of tough days ahead with surging COVID-19 infections, the director of the National Institutes of Health said Sunday the U.S. could decide in the next couple weeks whether to offer coronavirus booster shots to more Americans this fall. Dr. Francis Collins also pleaded anew for unvaccinated Americans to get their shots, calling them “sitting ducks” for a delta variant that is ravaging the country and showing little sign of letting up. “This is going very steeply upward with no signs of having peaked out,” he said. Federal health officials have been actively looking at whether extra shots for the vaccinated may be needed as early as this fall, reviewing case numbers in the U.S. “almost daily” as well as the situation in other countries such as Israel, where preliminary studies suggest the vaccine’s protection against serious illness dropped among those vaccinated in January.