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U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy defended the Biden administration's plans to begin rolling out booster shots for many Americans the week of Sept. 20, despite criticism from the World Health Organization and others that the U.S. should not offer booster shots to Americans while many countries lag in vaccine access. "We have to protect American lives and we have to help vaccinate the world because that is the only way this pandemic ends," Murthy told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Martha Raddatz. (Cherner, 8/22)

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that the United States can administer COVID-19 booster shots to Americans while still assisting in the global vaccination effort. Administering third doses of the COVID-19 vaccines to Americans while many countries struggle with vaccine shortages poses ethical concerns. (Saric, 8/22)

At no point in this ordeal has the ground beneath our feet seemed so uncertain. In just the past week, federal health officials said they would begin offering booster shots to all Americans in the coming months. Days earlier, those officials had assured the public that the vaccines were holding strong against the Delta variant of the virus, and that boosters would not be necessary. As early as Monday, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to formally approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has already been given to scores of millions of Americans. Some holdouts found it suspicious that the vaccine was not formally approved yet somehow widely dispensed. For them, “emergency authorization” has never seemed quite enough. (Mandavilli, 8/22)

Experts who evaluate drugs are getting pushed into a corner. Months after the FDA approved a controversial Alzheimer's drug against the advice of an expert panel and its own statisticians, the Biden administration is pushing for nationwide coronavirus vaccine boosters before independent experts have weighed in. (Herman, 8/23)

Kris Fredrick, an engineer at a television station in Amarillo, Texas, felt relieved when he got a second dose of the Moderna vaccine Feb. 1. But when the delta variant of the coronavirus started to spread across the U.S., Fredrick became unsettled. He has diabetes and hypertension, so he was worried he remained vulnerable to serious illness. He was concerned about the “anti-vaccine and anti-science sentiment” in his town, and he grew even more alarmed when he learned that two local hospitals were purportedly not requiring their employees to get vaccinated. (Arkin and Silva, 8/21)

A third dose of Pfizer (PFE.N)'s COVID-19 vaccine has significantly improved protection from infection and serious illness among people aged 60 and older in Israel compared with those who received two shots, findings published by the Health Ministry showed on Sunday. The data were presented at a meeting of a ministry panel of vaccination experts on Thursday and uploaded to its website on Sunday, though the full details of the study were not released. (8/22)