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At least 400,000 people in the United States have received COVID-19 booster shots since the extra injections were authorized last week, the Biden administration said Tuesday. “Our planning and preparation on boosters have propelled a strong start,” said Jeff Zients, a White House COVID-19 response coordinator, told reporters during a livestreamed news conference. Zients said most of the 400,000 injections were administered over the weekend, and nearly 1 million people have scheduled appointments to get their third shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The administration’s partnerships with states, long-term care facilities, doctors and pharmacies enabled it to “immediately” roll out boosters following last week’s approval of the shots by the federal government, Zients said. (Logan, 9/28)

Most additional doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine administered roughly six months after the primary series resulted in mild to moderate side effects, according to an analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Tuesday. The study was conducted when third-dose eligibility was limited to patients with moderate to severe immunocompromising conditions. The findings stemmed from data collected between Aug. 12 to Sept. 19 through v-safe, the CDC’s voluntary phone-based surveillance system, and included 22,191 registrants who reported receiving a third dose of the vaccine. (Rivas, 9/28)

The Biden administration’s COVID-19 booster shot campaign is off to a promising start, with about 1 million Americans signed up to receive a third Pfizer dose at pharmacies in the coming weeks, and adverse reactions to booster shots are rare, according to new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released Tuesday. This week, virus cases, hospitalizations and deaths have decreased nationwide. Biden administration officials said the vaccine race equity gap is closing as white, Black and Hispanic people now have similar inoculation rates. Roughly 75 percent of the currently eligible U.S. population has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to date, according to the CDC. (Cohen, 9/28)

"To me, the biggest policy question out there is the Johnson & Johnson [booster]," Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot at Vanderbilt University, who's a member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, told the panel. "I worry we're getting distracted by the question of boosters of Pfizer when we have bigger and more important things to do in the pandemic." The Johnson & Johnson booster is a "bigger" issue, several panelists noted, because people who received that vaccine may need a booster more urgently than those who received the Pfizer or Moderna. About 15 million Americans got the Johnson & Johnson shot, and many are wondering what to do. (Doucleff, 9/28)