Earlier the day, our medical experts announced a plan for booster shots to every fully vaccinated American, adult American.

On Wednesday afternoon, President Biden announced what his administration had been telegraphing for several days.

The plan is for every adult to get a booster shot eight months after you got your second shot.

In addition to vaccine mandates for some nursing home employees and an aggressive pushback on mass bans and schools,

the administration wants adults who got the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to be eligible for a third

shot, starting as early as September 20th.

It will make you safer and for longer.

And it will help us end the pandemic faster.

And hearing that made me wonder.

Will it?

I don't know, honestly. That's Saad Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

So there are two things, two variables there.

What do we mean by end of the pandemic?

So the longstanding pandemic and infectious disease experts at this point don't have high expectations

of elimination or eradication.

Instead, they expect the virus to be something we control aggressively but live with.

And then there's the other variable.

How much is protection from the vaccines waning?

It's pretty clear data that there is some waning happening.

And either it's waning or it's an effect of delta.

And I think it's a bit of both.

For some people, Saad says, boosters make sense.

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