(CNN) — Dr. Rochelle Walenksy, director of the Centers for US Disease Control and Prevention. (CDC) said Monday that boosters for people who have received the Moderna and J&J vaccines will be addressed with an urgency similar to that of the Pfizer vaccine.
During an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Walensky reiterated that current booster recommendations are only for people who received their second dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech covid-19 vaccine more than six months.
“We haven’t forgotten about you if you have received Moderna and J&J,” Walensky said, when asked how soon boosters could be seen for these groups, and if mixing and matching of vaccines could occur in the near future.
“We will address boosters for those populations with equal urgency, as well as studying the science and data for mixing and matching,” he said.
“I want to reiterate that this is a very slow decline. It is not urgent to go looking for reinforcement immediately. You do not have to rush to your reinforcement appointment,” he added.
“We will come to see the data from Moderna and J&J in a very short time. But really, in the meantime, among our focuses of attention now are not only the reinforcements, but to get those 70 million Americans who are not yet vaccinated, vaccinated “, he concluded.
Vaccination mandates work
In the same interview, Walensky said she is excited about the idea of more people getting vaccinated against COVID-19, and that vaccination mandates do work.
“I am a doctor, a public health official, I am not a lawyer, but what I will say is that we know that the more people are vaccinated, the more the community is protected, the fewer diseases there are in the community,” Walensky said when asked about her reaction to New York state’s deadline for healthcare workers to get vaccinated, the number of workers resisting, and what this says about whether vaccination mandates are working.
“We have seen these vaccination mandates get more people vaccinated,” he said.
“So I’m excited that more people are getting vaccinated because I think it’s good to protect individuals, it’s good to protect their own health, that of their families and that of the communities around them,” he added.
Asked if the potential loss of healthcare workers in the process actually created a safer environment in hospitals, Walensky said “it absolutely creates a challenge.”
He said that we must work to “educate these health workers, to know where they are, to understand where their doubts are, so that we can vaccinate them and they can go back to work.”
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