Fauci says Covid booster shots may have to be taken every five years rather than annually

Chief medical adviser says federal restrictions will end ‘soon’

Dr Anthony Fauci has said some people may only need Covid booster shots “every four or five years” instead of annually.

“It will depend on who you are,” he told the Financial Times in an interview on Wednesday, “but if you are a normal, healthy 30-year-old person with no underlying conditions, you might need a booster only every four or five years.” 

Dr Fauci previously suggested – as recently as December – that it might be necessary for people to get vaccinated annually to prevent a resurgence of Covid.

He said during an appearance on CNN: “One of the things I’m very interested in and my colleagues, is that when you get a boost, the booster shot for example with an mRNA or a Pfizer, do you not only elevate the level of antibodies to a high level but do you induce a degree of affinity maturation”.

Dr Fauci said that was “a big word to mean that you really get the immune response to get a much greater breadth and a much greater strength so that we maybe don’t have to boost every eight months, nine months”.

“It may be we get a durability of immunity. Or maybe not, and if it is not, we’ll have to deal with it depending upon how the outbreak and the global pandemic evolves.”

The US chief medical adviser added in Wednesday’s interview that the United States was moving out of “the full-blown pandemic phase” and that interventions would be increasingly local.

“There will also be more people making their own decisions on how they want to deal with the virus,” Dr Fauci said of public health measures – including mandatory mask wearing.

Asked when that would occur, he reportedly said “soon”, and suggested that the United States’s approach to dealing with Covid would in time not come from the White House.

As many as 64 per cent of Americans have been fully vaccinated and 43 per cent have been boosted, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Infections and deaths are meanwhile falling, with the daily average for Covid cases in the US dropping from around 770,000 a day to around 250,000 within the past month.

Deaths, which are averaging around 2,000 a day, have meanwhile begin to fall from a recent peak. The statistic often lags behind the number of infections.