Younger People May Not Need COVID-19 Boosters: Moderna CEO

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel speaks at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos on May 23, 2022. (Fabrice Coffrini/Getty Images)

Many younger people may not need COVID-19 boosters, the CEO of Moderna said on Oct. 17.

“I think it’s going to be like the flu. If you’re a 25-year-old do you need an annual booster every year if you’re healthy?” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said during a Yahoo Finance event.

“You might want it because you want to protect older people, you might want it because you don’t want to get sick or miss vacation and so on, but I think it’s going to be similar to flu where it’s going to be people at high risk, people above 50 years of age, people with co-morbidities, people with cancer and of a condition or have transplants, and that’s really important to think about it,” he continued.

“It’s a lot of people that are going to need an annual booster. And people that are younger are going to need to decide what to do.”

The vaccines from Moderna and other vaccine makers have proven increasingly poor against infection and have been unable to prevent transmission. The protection against severe illness has also gone down both over time and against newer virus variants.

Additionally, while the boosters boost protection against infection and severe disease initially, that shielding quickly wanes, according to studies from the United States, Israel, and elsewhere.

Officials in some countries outside the United States recommend boosters only for select groups such as the elderly. Florida officials also advise against vaccinating many children.

But U.S. authorities are still advising virtually every American 5 and older to get one or more boosters and have floated an annual booster campaign similar to the influenza vaccination program, with updated formulations to target whichever strain or strains of the COVID-19 virus that is circulating at the time.

Authorities recently cleared and recommended updated Moderna and Pfizer boosters, despite a dearth of clinical data.

Few Americans have followed the recommendations—just 5 percent of Americans who are eligible have received an updated shot, or —but Bancel claimed that he’s seen favorable data.

“The uptake is actually stronger than seasonal flu from that data I’ve seen,” he told Yahoo.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, meanwhile, told CNBC host Andrew Sorkin in a recent interview that boosters are important and recounted being surprised that he contracted COVID-19 twice in recent months despite having received a primary series and several boosters.

The full interview is not being released until Oct. 19.