An adviser to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during an interview advised young people not to receive the recently approved bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster doses due to a lack of human testing.
Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, told CNN this weekend that he isn’t convinced that the new Omicron subvariant-specific boosters will provide any benefit to healthy, younger adults.
“When you’re asking people to get a vaccine, I think there has to be clear evidence of benefit,” he remarked in an on-air interview. “And we’re not going to have clinical studies, obviously, before this launches, but you’d like to have at least human data [on] people getting this vaccine, you see a clear and dramatic increase in neutralizing antibiotics, and then at least you have a correlate of protection against (Omicron subvariant) BA.4, BA.5….