Pfizer said it plans to meet with senior U.S. health officials on Monday to discuss the drugmaker’s request for the federal government to approve a third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci admitted, “ This is completely conceivable, and it may “need to strengthen injections.”

The company said it plans to hold a meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other officials on Monday, after Pfizer said a few days before it needed a booster injection within 12 months.

Dr. Mikael Dolsten of Pfizer told the Associated Press last week that early data from the company’s booster study showed that people’s antibody levels jumped by 5 to 10 after the third dose compared to the second dose a few months ago. Times – it sees evidence supporting the need for enhancers.

On Sunday, Fauci did not rule out this possibility, but said it was too early for the government to recommend another injection. He said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FDA did the right thing last week, and they refuted Pfizer’s statement that they believed that booster injections were not needed “at this time”.

Fauci said that clinical research and laboratory data have not yet fully demonstrated the need to strengthen the current two-injection vaccine of Pfizer and Moderna or the one-injection vaccine of Johnson & Johnson.

“Now, given the data and information we have, we don’t need to give people a third chance,” he said. “This doesn’t mean that we stop there… Now we are doing research to study whether and when we should improve people’s feasibility.”

He said that in the coming months, “as the data develops,” the government is likely to urge it to strengthen based on factors such as age and underlying medical conditions.

“Of course, this is completely conceivable, maybe at some point, we need to push,” Fauci said.

Other leading vaccine experts questioned Pfizer’s reasoning and said that more data is needed to justify boosting vaccines, especially as many countries struggle to manage the initial vaccine doses needed to protect their citizens.

Larry Corey, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who is overseeing the U.S. government-supported COVID-19 vaccine trial, told Reuters: “It’s disappointing that they have made such a complicated Decided, but adopted such a unilateral approach.”

Vaccine resistance

The Washington Post first reported on the planned meeting between Pfizer and US health officials on Monday.

Currently, only about 48% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated. Immunization rates in certain areas of the country are much lower, and in these areas, Delta variants are proliferating.

Last week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that this has led to “two facts”: Highly immune areas in the United States are returning to normal, while the number of hospitalizations elsewhere is rising.

Fauci said that when scientific data shows how effective vaccines are in preventing COVID-19 infection and hospitalization, it is puzzling for some Americans to resist vaccination so much. He is frustrated with efforts to prevent vaccines being more accessible, such as Door-to-door publicity of Biden’s proposal.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson agreed on Sunday that southern and rural states like him have vaccine resistance because “you have a more conservative approach and are skeptical of the government.”

Hutchinson described his efforts to strengthen vaccination in his state, where the state’s infection rate is rising. He said “no one wants agents to knock on the door”, but “we do hope that those who cannot enter in other ways People make sure they know about it”.

The grassroots part of the federal vaccination campaign has been in operation since April, when the supply of vaccines began to exceed demand. It is outlined and funded by Congress in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill passed in March, and the vast majority of it is implemented by local officials, private sector workers, and volunteers.

Republican representative Adam Kinzinger from Illinois criticized some Republican lawmakers for opposing vaccination as “absolute insanity.” He said that California’s House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and others in the party need to speak up against “these absolute clown politicians who use your fear of vaccines for their own benefit.”