The Biden administration's fall campaign to get people vaccinated with the omicron booster has been off to a slow start, with only 14.8 million people opting to get the new shot since it was first made available in late August to those 12 and older and earlier this week to those 5-11 years old.
The government hoped to have more people boosted in anticipation of a rise of COVID-19 cases going into the holiday season, purchasing over 170 million doses of Moderna's and Pfizer-BioNTech's updated boosters in advance, but public interest has appeared to wane as only a small percentage of the roughly 226 million people who have completed their primary vaccination series have received the new booster, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released Thursday.
Awareness of the updated booster was moderate overall, with a third of all adults saying they had heard"some" about the new shot. "We're aware that community knowledge about the bivalent booster is still fairly low. That is, people don't know it is available and also don't know why they need it,” said Vanchiere."We're working on the PR side of things to get that message out to help people to understand there’s two components to it.
"Overall, the vaccination push will continue to be a long slog, perhaps only receiving a jolt if cases start to rise significantly and/or a new variant emerges that is more harmful," tweeted Jen Kates, Kaiser Family Foundation's director of global health and HIV policy.
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