Booster shots: Half of eligible U.S. residents haven't gotten theirs despitr evidence of importance.

As evidence favoring boosters mounts, half of eligible U.S. residents haven't gotten theirs Several new studies show booster shots improve protection against Covid infection, hospitalization and death. But many eligible people have yet to get boosted. NBC News

Even as the wealth of evidence in favor of Covid booster shots continues to grow, the share of eligible people in the U.S. who’ve actually gotten them remains stubbornly around 50 percent.

Over the last week alone, several new studies have reinforced that booster shots significantly improve protection against Covid infection, hospitalization and death.

The most recent, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, came from Pfizer’s ongoing vaccine trial. Researchers compared infection rates between participants who got just the initial two shots followed by a placebo and those who got a third dose and found that the booster’s efficacy was 95 percent. 

"We’ve got to do better when it comes to boosters, and we’re trying everything we can to get the message out of why it is so important," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease expert, said at a White House briefing Wednesday. "Because when you look at the data of what boosters do, particularly in the era of omicron, boosters are extremely important."

The stagnation in boosters is likely due to a combination of factors, said Dr. Rachael Lee, a health care epidemiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. That includes the absence of employer mandates and fears about rare reactions like myocarditis. Some people may also be holding out, she said, "waiting to see if companies will create a booster vaccine targeting variants such as BA.2." ...

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released (last) Friday showed that from Dec. 19 through Jan. 31 — when the omicron variant of the coronavirus was dominant — the hospitalization rate among adults who got vaccinated but not boosted was three times that of those who got boosters. A second CDC study released the same day showed that two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine were 79 percent effective at preventing mechanical ventilation and death during the omicron wave, whereas three doses were 94 percent effective.

Even boosted people who have wound up in the hospital with Covid still have lower mortality, according to a study published Thursday in The Lancet Regional Health.  ...