As we head into the third winter of the pandemic, only about 13% of American adults — less than 11% of Americans overall — have received the bivalent COVID-19 booster. Only about 34 million adults in the U.S. have opted to get the new shot, which became available in September. The bivalent boosters, which were developed by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer, are designed to better protect people against the forms of the virus that are currently circulating.
Medical experts say the lackluster interest in the new boosters is due to several factors: pandemic fatigue, mixed messages from public-health officials, confusion about how the new boosters are different from previous shots, and the government’s decision to authorize the updated boosters without first getting clinical data in humans. “It’s hard for people to wade through that,” said Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “Some of them are just throwing up their hands and saying, ‘I got vaccinated, and that’s all I need to do.’ Which, unfortunately, is not.” A lot has changed since 2020. We now have vaccines that do a pretty good job of keeping most people from getting so sick that they end up in the hospital or die. You can now pick up at-home tests from pharmacies, and there are antiviral …