Even though the updated COVID-19 vaccines are supposed to be free—either covered by insurance plans or by a federal program—people keep getting bills. I’d like to collect stories about vaccine access challenges here at the COVID-19 Data Dispatch.
This week, the FDA made some adjustments to the U.S.’s COVID-19 vaccine guidance in order to standardize all new mRNA shots to bivalent (or Omicron-specific) vaccines, and to allow adults at higher risk to receive additional boosters. The CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and Director Rochelle Walensky both endorsed these changes.
Last week, the team behind Bloomberg’s COVID-19 vaccine tracker announced that the dashboard will stop updating on October 5. Thank you to this team for your work tracking the vaccine rollout!
New, Omicron-specific booster shots are publicly available for all American adults who’ve been previously vaccinated. But awareness of the shots and uptake so far are both incredibly low.
Unlike previous vaccination campaigns, the new Omicron boosters are available to all adults across the country who have been previously inoculated. But all previously-vaccinated Americans are not facing similar levels of COVID-19 risk.