10 Million Americans Have Received Updated COVID-19 Vaccines, HHS Says

U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, receives one of the new COVID-19 vaccines at a CVS in Washington on Sept. 20, 2023. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

About 10 million people have received one of the updated COVID-19 vaccines, a spokesperson for the Biden administration said.

“The administration remains committed to pulling every lever at its disposal during the fall respiratory vaccination campaign, encouraging the American public to stay up to date on their vaccines to keep themselves and their loved ones safe,” a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email on Oct. 18.

“As a result of these efforts, around 10 million Americans have been vaccinated since the updated vaccines were authorized, and recommended last month,” she added.

The 10 million figure, about 3 percent of the U.S. population, is up from some 7 million last week.

Pharmacies, health care providers, and manufacturers voluntarily provide the data, which they had been required to disclose under the since-expired public health emergency.

They haven’t yet provided demographic information, so the government does not have a breakdown by age, the spokeswoman said.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in September cleared the updated vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer and later authorized an updated Novavax shot. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that people aged 6 months and older receive one of the vaccines, regardless of underlying health, previous vaccination, or prior infection.

The two agencies, both part of the HHS, took the steps although there wasn’t strong evidence of the vaccines’ effectiveness. The only clinical data made public have been from Moderna, which tested its new shot in 50 humans. That testing found that the new shot induced higher levels of neutralizing antibodies, thought to protect against COVID-19, than the previous version of Moderna’s vaccine.

HHS officials, despite the lack of data, have repeatedly said the vaccines will protect people and those around them.

“The truth is that these vaccines are safe and effective,” Dr. Peter Marks, a top Food and Drug Administration official, said at an event on Oct. 11.

The vaccines risk causing side effects such as heart inflammation.

“We’ve determined that the benefits overwhelmingly outweigh the risks,” Dr. Marks said.

Although some outside doctors have advised widespread vaccination, others have decried the promotion of the vaccines absent clinical data.

“There is no evidence the booster protects against getting COVID,” Dr. Vinay Prasad, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California–San Francisco, wrote recently.

“Randomized trials are necessary to learn the true net effects,” he also wrote. “Just because the Biden administration is working, hand in hand with Pfizer doesn’t mean we have to accept it. Boycotting an unproven medical product is the only way to get them to run trials in the future.”

Pfizer has already slashed its outlook for the year, in part because of the lower-than-expected demand. Moderna said it still expects to make $6 billion to $8 billion on its new vaccine.

Before the new shots were rolled out, the previous round of vaccines, with bivalent formulations, were authorized and recommended in the fall of 2022. They were available for about a year.

According to data collected by the CDC through May, when the health emergency ended, just 17 percent of Americans, or 56.4 million, received one of those shots.

Many of the recipients were older. Just 0.6 percent of children under 5 received one of the bivalent vaccines, along with 5 percent of children aged 5 to 11, 7.8 percent of children aged 12 to 17, and 7.4 percent of adults aged 18 to 24.

Concern?

Most of the doses of the COVID-19 vaccines administered during the pandemic were purchased by the U.S. government during the Trump and Biden administrations. The market transitioned to a commercialized program, with private companies paying for some shots, earlier this year.

Still, the government did buy some shots and has moved to cover others.

The government paid $1.1 billion for what it’s calling the Bridge Access Program, to cover COVID-19 vaccines and treatments for people who do not have health insurance. It also bought 20 million doses of the new vaccines for children under the Vaccines for Children Program, which dates back to 1994.

Of the doses for children, just 800,000 have been shipped, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, a CDC official, said on Oct. 11.

“We’re working really closely with all components of the supply chain, from manufacturer, distributor, etc., and make sure the vaccine is moving,” he said.

“We’re actually doing gangbusters business,” he added later.

The U.S. government has already during the pandemic been forced to discard tens of millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses because of lack of demand. There are concerns that even when buying vaccines only for children, more will be thrown out.

“9.2 million unused doses would mean >$1.5 billion extra spent on covid vaccines for kids by the US govt,” Dr. Tracy Hoeg, an epidemiologist in California, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, in reaction to Dr. Daskalakis’s comments.

HHS officials say they plan to keep distributing more doses of the vaccines.

The HHS spokeswoman said the government isn’t concerned about possible waste.

“We haven’t heard of any concerns about ordering too many” or not enough children getting them, she said.