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# Stop Trying to Prevent Covid in Healthy People: Offit
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/stop-trying-to-prevent-covid-in-healthy-people-offit/
- Published: 2023-01-12T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T18:11:44.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: Biologics, #legacy-id-D5153524

FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee member **Paul Offit**, who is affiliated with the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, says a lesson learned from the experience with bivalent Covid-19 booster shots is to “stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later.” Writing in a *New England Journal of Medicine* Perspective column, Offit [says](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2215780?ref=fdaweb.com) booster dosing is probably best reserved for the people most likely to need protection against severe disease, such as older adults, people with multiple coexisting conditions that put them at high risk for serious illness, and those who are immunocompromised.

Offit notes that the mRNA vaccine technology-enabled companies to respond quickly to variant strains by creating bivalent vaccines. However, he says, research following the government push for bivalent boosters found little difference in effectiveness between them and the monovalent vaccines. And he says that any moderate increase in protection against probably mild disease from the bivalent boosters is likely to be short-lived.