Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, September 8th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

Pfizer's top scientist is defending the company's COVID-19 vaccine.

The Taliban has formed a new government in Afghanistan, and a member of the Federal Reserve doesn't see any reason why the US Central Bank should change its acid-taper-timeline.

Plus, Xi Jinping is extending the Chinese Communist Party's dominance over civil society, and it feels pretty modest.

He is a true believer, and the necessity of party control and his control over the party.

We'll take a look at the future of China under President Xi. I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

The pharmaceutical company Pfizer has come under attack lately over its COVID-19 vaccine. Some scientists and global health officials have criticized Pfizer for urging governments to adopt vaccine booster programs.

But Pfizer's Philip Dormitzer defended booster shots when he spoke to the FT recently. Dormitzer is Pfizer's chief scientific officer, and he said there was good reason to be proactive when it came to booster shots.

He said if Pfizer waited until there were just widespread breakthroughs of severe disease, the company would be way too late.

The US is preparing to roll out booster shots later this month. American COVID hospitalizations and deaths have been rising because of the delta variant of coronavirus, especially in areas with low vaccination rates.

Yesterday, the Taliban announced that it is formed its first government since the US and its allies left Afghanistan.

The caretaker cabinet includes men sanctioned by the UN for terrorism and an interior minister on the FBI's most wanted list.

Notably, the government had few women and members of Afghanistan's ethnic groups, and the FT's Stephanie Finley says the lack of diversity could make the Taliban's relationship with the international community complicated.

The use of government was one of the, you know, so-called preconditions of international recognition that the US, but also other regional powers laid down in order to give the Taliban government legitimacy, which is seen as key to unlocking a humanitarian aid for an economic and humanitarian crisis that is spiraling out of control.

The UN has said that this is caretaker government. They have suggested that it will be more inclusive in the future, but experts and observers have told me that a caretaker government doesn't necessarily mean that it will be changing anytime soon.

And the fact that we're seeing such senior members of the Taliban leadership taking these key roles means that any dramatic change is probably unlikely.

That's the FT's Stephanie Finley.

There was an abrupt slowdown in US jobs growth in August.

235,000 jobs were created last month, but that's down after back-to-back months of roughly one million new jobs in both June and July.

But this news isn't rattling the St. Louis Fed president James Bullard, especially when it comes to the US Central Bank's timeline for tapering its asset purchases.

Bullard spoke to the FT's Colby Smith yesterday, and she joins me now. Colby, why wasn't Bullard deterred by the most recent US jobs report?

I think for him, he saw it as yet another sign that the labor market recovery is continuing.

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