Gov. Charlie Baker hopes to get some guidance around COVID-19 booster shots during a call with federal officials Tuesday, he said during an address to the New England Council.
Speaking to the business group via video call, Baker described the questions around booster shots as “a good example of an issue that’s been all over the place in the media, through no fault of the media.”
“There’s just been a lot of chatter about it for the better part of the month,” he said.
Federal health officials in August announced plans to make booster shots available to all American adults who have already receive both doses of a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, starting the week of Sept. 20. But as that date approaches, it’s unclear when and for whom booster doses will ultimately be authorized, with a Food and Drug Administration panel planning to meet Friday to discuss the Pfizer vaccine data.
About 76 percent of the state’s population is fully vaccinated, Baker said, a rate that lands second behind Vermont’s. Baker said that preparing to immunize kids younger than 12, when they become eligible for vaccines, is another important issue on his radar.
“Most of us had heard from the feds several months ago that it would be 2022 before there was any real traction on this,” he said. “There’s been some talk recently that it might happen a lot sooner than that. That obviously will be something that we’ll have to figure out how to handle, if it does turn out to be a lot sooner than that, with our colleagues in the health care and public health world, to make sure that we have an infrastructure in place that can do both boosters and potentially younger kids at the same time if that’s where we land.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that President Biden has not received a booster shot. “We’ll wait until it’s widely available, which we expect to be soon,” she said, according to a transcript.
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