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Last week, Pfizer announced that it plans to request an emergency use authorization for a booster vaccine shot for COVID-19. Within hours, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement asserting, “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time.” The Department of Health and Human Services reiterated this after it and senior U.S. scientists met with top Pfizer representatives this week. Immunologists, health policy experts, the director of the World Health Organization and pundits have criticized Pfizer for planning to request this approval. Some suggest that it’s a cash grab for the vaccine maker and others assert simply that more data are needed. What these responses ignore is growing evidence that a third shot may provide lifesaving protection to immunocompromised people (including organ transplant patients), which represent approximately 3% to 4% of our adult population. (Jennifer Mnookin and Robert Mnookin, 7/13)

Politics trounced public health when the Tennessee Department of Health fired top vaccine official Michelle Fiscus on Monday. The losers: the citizens of Tennessee. Fiscus was terminated as TDOH's medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs because she apparently was trying too hard to get every Tennessean to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. That's absurd and dangerous. (7/13)

Two states. Two different paths in responding to covid-19. Together, they offer invaluable lessons about the road ahead for the nation — especially as infection rates creep up because of the delta variant. The two states are Vermont and South Dakota. Both feature among the three states that Covid Act Now classifies as falling in the lowest-risk category, along with Massachusetts. This may be a surprise. While New England states are known to have done extraordinarily well in vaccinating their populations, South Dakota is in the middle of the pack. So, what explains the fact that South Dakota has infection numbers almost as low as Vermont, the most vaccinated state in the nation? (Ashish K. Jha, 7/13)

Watching my teams lose is often more compelling than watching the Fox evening lineup, but I was nonetheless doubtful when a New York Times headline claimed “Fox News hosts smear America’s vaccination efforts.” It turned out, on visiting the transcript, that Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson had merely reacted in their usual hyperbolic way to a Joe Biden suggestion to send vaccinators door to door. Mr. Carlson, in particular, seemed like he might grasp the law of diminishing returns, because he started his remarks by praising U.S. success so far in getting 67% of adults vaccinated. (Holman W. Jenkins Jr., 7/13)

My mother and I stood under a canopy of coconut trees and watched the full moon rise, illuminating the sand and sea before us. I clasped her hand and put my head on her shoulder, closing my eyes and saying a silent prayer of gratitude. After a coronavirus test, a self-imposed quarantine and a 22-hour trip that included four airports and three flights, I had arrived in Brazil in mid-June and was able to hug my family for the first time since the pandemic tore the world apart. I had purchased the ticket to Brazil in January, after my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, as an act of faith. By the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, I hoped, my parents and siblings would be fully vaccinated in Bahia, the impoverished but wonderful Brazilian state I’m from, as would I and my partner and daughter in Arizona. (Fernanda Santos, 7/12)