Fauci: Boosters Are for Keeping People Healthy, Not Alive

Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here.

A week after FDA and CDC advisory committees clashed on the nuances of when and whether to recommend COVID-19 booster shots, Anthony Fauci told my colleague Ed Yong that he still believes third doses of the mRNA vaccines are crucial, suggesting once again that they will eventually be part of a standard regimen.

As those committees deliberated, the experts considered qualitative evidence on the shots’ safety and efficacy, but also kept getting stuck on two larger conceptual questions. First: What, exactly, is the point of offering third shots? Skeptics of large-scale boosting argue that the COVID-19 vaccines were designed to prevent severe hospitalization and death, while third shots seem more likely to offer (temporary) protection against infection and mild disease. In their view, boosting wouldn’t offer any meaningful gains. “I reject that,” Fauci, who serves as Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said at The Atlantic Festival today. “I think we should be preventing people from getting sick from COVID even if they don’t wind up in the hospital.”

The second big question that tripped up the experts: Are third shots of an mRNA vaccine really boosters to remind our immune systems how to fight off the enemy, or are they essential for everyone to reach full? Fauci has previously suggested that third shots could become common practice, and today took an even stronger tack: “It is likely, for a real complete regimen, that you would need at least a third dose.”