CDC director defends controversial call on Pfizer’s Covid boosters

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, insisted Friday she didn’t overrule a vaccine advisory committee by expanding the CDC’s approval of Pfizer’s Covid boosters to include a proposal rejected by the panel.

In an unusual move, Walensky broke from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which voted 9-6 on Thursday against authorizing vaccines for those in high-risk transmission environments.

Walensky adopted the panel’s other recommendations to distribute third shots to adults with underlying medical conditions and everyone 65 and older. She said the last vote, which clears extra doses for teachers, health-care workers and other essential employees, was a “scientific close call.”

“I want to be very clear that I did not overrule an advisory committee,” Walensky said at a White House Covid briefing Friday. “I listened to all of the proceedings of the FDA advisory committee and intently listened to this exceptional group of scientists that publicly and very transparently deliberated for hours over some of these very difficult questions and where the science was.”

Walensky’s directive aligns closely with the Food and Drug Administration’s ruling on boosters Wednesday. That agency similarly bucked advice from its panel of scientific advisors by authorizing the shots for a broader audience than endorsed by its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

“This was a scientific close call,” Walensky said, noting the lengthy two-day meeting and robust debate. “It was my call to make. If I had been in the room I would have voted yes.”

She sought to reassure public confidence by encouraging people to go back and listen to the committee’s deliberations. “We did it publicly, we did it transparently, and we did it with some of the best scientists in the country,” she added.

Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a voting member of the FDA’s advisory committee, opposed boosters for young people out of fear they could cause myocarditis. Offit called Walensky’s expansion of ACIP’s recommendation “a first,” adding that he thought Pfizer should have run more extensive booster trials before submitting its findings to the FDA and CDC.

“A healthy person less than 30, I would wait to see how this rolls out,” Offit told CNBC. “Wait for a few million doses to get out there.”

But with the U.S. experiencing a seven-day average of 2,011 deaths per day as of Thursday, up 6% from a week ago, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, other doctors support Walensky’s decision.

Adjusting the panel’s guidance was within Walensky’s purview, even if it broke from precedent, said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of…