Long-Term Care Advocates, Worried About Vulnerable Residents, Say Plans for COVID-19 Booster Shots Must Start Now

Long-term care advocates say a plan for a potential COVID-19 booster shot is needed immediately, concerned that long-term care residents will be the first to suffer if the coronavirus vaccine wears off, reports ABC News . According to Thaddeus Stappenbeck at the Department of Inflammation and Immunity at Cleveland Clinic, the part of the immune system governing antibody production declines with age. Vaccine companies and health officials therefore need to act now before immunity flags among the older people in nursing communities who were among the first during the pandemic to be immunized. The CEOs of vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna said last week that the first in the United States to get a vaccine could need a booster by this fall. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci thinks a booster shot will be necessary eventually. "The shame of this is that when COVID-19 runs rampant in a nursing community the mortality rate is significant," said Mike Wasserman on California's Vaccine Advisory Committee. "Hence, if and when the residents' immunity wanes, we must be on high alert, lest we relive the horrors of the past year."