Fauci says he’s continuing to evaluate whether booster is needed to be considered fully vaccinated

Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that authorities are ‘continuing to evaluate’ whether a third booster shot will be required to be considered fully vaccinated for COVID-19. 

‘For official requirements, it’s still two shots of the mRNA (Pfizer or Moderna) and one shot of the J&J for the official determination of what’s required or not,’ Fauci told ABC News on Sunday. 

‘But I think if you look at the data, the more and more it becomes clear that if you want to be optimally protected you really should get a booster,’ Fauci added.

‘I think we’ll be continuing to evaluate what the official designation is’ for official fully vaccinated status, he said.

A sign on the door of restaurant explaining New York’s current vaccination mandates

Asked whether further annual boosters will be needed, Fauci said it was ‘tough to tell’.

‘If it becomes necessary to get yet another boost, then we’ll just have to deal with it when that occurs,’ he said. 

The United States on Sunday reached 800,000 coronavirus-related deaths, according to a Reuters tally, as the nation braces for a potential surge in infections due to colder weather and the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the virus.

The milestone means the U.S. death toll from this one virus now exceeds the entire population of North Dakota.

Officials say that a vaccine booster provides good protection against the Omicron variant, but the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that a third of US Omicron cases were boosted.

A sign reads ‘Proof Of Vaccine Required For Entry’ at a bar in the French Quarter on August 16, 2021 in New Orleans, Louisiana

The CDC said Friday that it detected 43 case of Omicron in the US during the first eight days of December, among which 34 were fully vaccinated and 14 were boosted.

Six had previously recovered from a COVID infection. Young adults under the age of 40 accounted for most of the Omicron cases, and there were no deaths among the group. One of the cases was briefly hospitalized.

There were almost certainly many more cases of Omicron in the US than were detected through surveillance testing, but full extent of the variant’s spread remains unclear.   

Even with vaccines widely and freely available, the country has lost more lives to the virus this year than in 2020 due to the more contagious Delta variant and people refusing to get inoculated against COVID-19.

Since the start of the year, over 450,000 people in the United States have died after contracting COVID-19, or 57 percent of all U.S. deaths from the illness since the pandemic started.

Registered Nurse Darian Sumbingco administers the first dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination clinic in Los Angeles in September

The deaths this year were mostly in unvaccinated patients, health experts say. Deaths have increased despite advances in caring for COVID patients and new treatment options such as monoclonal antibodies.

It took 111 days for U.S. deaths to jump from 600,000 to 700,000, according to Reuters analysis. The next 100,000 deaths took just 73 days.

Other countries have lost far fewer lives per capita in the past 11 months, according to the Reuters analysis.

Among the Group of Seven (G7) wealthiest nations, the United States ranks the worst in terms of per capita deaths from COVID-19 between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30, according to the Reuters analysis.

The death rate in the United States was more than three times higher than in neighboring Canada and 11 times more than Japan.