A key adviser to the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine panel is questioning whether more Covid booster shots are necessary for healthy, younger people.

The evidence for the new versions of the vaccines for the omicron variant of the coronavirus, which the FDA authorized in August, is “underwhelming” and fails to show they are much better than the original shots, Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician who is a leading vaccine and infectious diseases expert, wrote Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Protecting people against Covid infection with the current mRNA technology may be a pipe dream, especially as new coronavirus strains emerge every few months, Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told NBC News.

The updated boosters from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are probably best reserved for people at high risk of severe illness or death from Covid — older adults, people with multiple coexisting conditions, and those who are immunocompromised, Offit said.

Asking young, healthy people who have a lower risk of serious illness to get boosted with a variant-specific vaccine, followed by a different variant-specific formula a few months later, may not be practical, he said.

more at nbcnews.com

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