UPDATED: 10 a.m.
PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Federal health officials are expected to recommend, as early as this week, that most Americans, regardless of age, get a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot. However, a Philadelphia doctor on the FDA's vaccine advisory committee says he is surprised by the sudden urgency.
Sources tell CBS News and other news organizations that the recommendation would be for people to get the booster eight months after they receive the second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. It is not clear what the guidance would be for those who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, as officials wait for more data to become available.
Talk of boosters have been taking place for a while, but Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA's vaccine advisory committee, says that can undermine the message that the vaccines are safe and enormously effective at keeping people alive and out of the hospital.
"I think we're focusing on the wrong thing. The notion of having to boost people who are already vaccinated is not where we should be right now," Offit said.
He says the focus should still be on getting millions more Americans their first dose.
Last week, U.S. health officials recommended boosters for some with weakened immune systems, citing their higher risk of catching the virus and evidence that the vaccines' effectiveness waned over time.
Officials say, before the boosters are administered widely, the FDA would formally approve the vaccines. That action is expected for the Pfizer shot in the coming weeks. Currently all three COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States are under emergency use authorization.
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According to the New York Times, first to report details of the government’s plans, health care workers, nursing home residents and emergency workers are likely to be the highest-priority recipients of the boosters. These were among the first people to be vaccinated, starting last December.
Since then, more than 198 million Americans have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with more than 168 million fully vaccinated. Still, the country is experiencing a fourth surge of virus cases due to the more transmissible delta variant, which is spreading aggressively through unvaccinated communities but is also responsible for an increasing number of so-called "breakthrough infections."
According to CDC data, the country is averaging 108,000 new cases a day in the last week. Two months ago, it was around 12,000.
Before reports about the boosters came out on Monday, Pfizer released Phase 1 clinical trial data on the third dose of it's two-dose vaccine. In the trial, participants received a booster eight to nine months after their second dose.
"Results from this participant group show that the third dose elicited significantly higher neutralizing antibodies against the initial SARS-CoV-2 virus ... compared to the levels observed after the two-dose primary series, as well as against the Beta variant and the highly infectious Delta variant," the company announced in a press release.
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There has been mixed messaging on the need for boosters among the general public. For months, officials had said data still indicated that people remain highly protected from COVID-19, including the delta variant, after receiving the two-dose Pfizer or Moderna regimen or the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Offit of the FDA's advisory committee says he is surprised by the sudden urgency regarding a vaccine booster, and he fears the confusing messaging will undermine public confidence.
"I think we have set an unrealistic expectation for this vaccine. This vaccine was and remains very good at protecting against severe and critical disease," he said.
And Offit is one expert who has been pushing against the term "breakthrough" to refer to those asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic infections in fully vaccinated people.
"They're not breakthroughs. The term 'breakthrough' suggests failure, and that's not a failure," he said.
But U.S. health officials made clear Sunday they are preparing for the possibility that the time for boosters may come sooner than later.
"There is a concern that the vaccine may start to wane in its effectiveness," Collins said. "And delta is a nasty one for us to try to deal with. The combination of those two means we may need boosters, maybe beginning first with health care providers, as well as people in nursing homes, and then gradually moving forward" with others, such as older Americans who were among the first to get vaccinations.
He said because the delta variant only started hitting the U.S. hard in July, the "next couple of weeks" of case data will help the U.S. make a decision.
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Officials were continuing to collect information as well about the J&J vaccine, which was only approved in the U.S. in late February, to determine when to recommend boosters, one of the officials said.
The White House has said that even though the U.S. has begun sharing more than 110 million vaccine doses with the world, the nation has enough domestic supply to deliver boosters to Americans should they be recommended by health officials.
Global health officials, including the World Health Organization, have called on wealthier and more-vaccinated countries to hold off on booster shots to ensure the supply of first doses for people in the developing world.