NJ beginning September booster shot prep for up to 2.4M people

On Sept. 20, upward of 2.4 million New Jerseyans could be eligible for the COVID-19 booster shot, Gov. Phil Murphy said Aug. 30. In response, the state is preparing to reactivate its massive vaccination infrastructure, in mothballs since the late spring.

At issue is whether the booster should be given six or eight months after receiving the second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, according to Murphy.

“If it’s six, a lot more people instantly on Sept. 20 are going to be eligible,” Murphy said during a regular COVID-19 press briefing on Monday.

Those state efforts could mean the state would “almost certainly” have to reopen its six vaccine mega sites in North, Central and South Jersey, which all went offline early in June, Murphy added. On top of that, the state would tap into county-run vaccine sites, and rely on the existing system of local pharmacies and hospitals, according to New Jersey Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli.

It’s not clear which of the six mega-sites would be reactivated.

“While we have tremendous capacity at our vaccination sites now, we are working hard to increase it further,” the governor said.

As he noted, the booster shot was for the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccine – research is still underway for the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot.

“We will reopen several larger vaccination centers and mega sites to serve the millions of individuals who will become eligible for booster shots this fall,” he added.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the “goal is for people to start receiving a COVID-19 booster shot beginning this fall, with individuals being eligible starting [eight] months after they received their second dose.”

The first people who got the vaccine were health care workers, those with preexisting medical conditions, seniors and other essential frontline workers, and the CDC notes that as a result, they would be the first to likely get a booster shot.

“It’s now months-long after those people were first vaccinated, so is their immunity beginning to wane?” said Dr. Ed Lifshitz, the state Health Department’s medical director.

But it’s not clear, he said, whether reinfections or “breakthrough cases” are the result of the highly contagious delta variant or a natural wane in immunity from the vaccine, hence the need for the booster shot.

“There continues to be a very open debate … which is how often are we going to require this? Is it going to be annual, is it going to be every six or eight months, is it going to be five years, 10 years,” the governor said. “We’re going to augment our distribution in the early two or three months of whatever that cycle is. If this is an annual event, I bet you we’ll be here a year from now talking about mega sites for a concentrated period of time.”

More than 5.6 million people who live, work or study in New Jersey have gotten the COVID-19 vaccine, out of the more than 9 million people who live in the state. No vaccine has been authorized in any capacity for those under the age of 12.

Whether the CDC opts to peg the booster shots at the six or eight-month window would determine the level of work cut out of the state. If the former, Murphy said, “we’re going to have a very, very busy few weeks.”

“We will identify what the throughput has to be on a daily basis to make sure that everyone in New Jersey that’s eligible to get vaccinated with a booster shot” will get it “within a four-month period,” Persichilli said.

With COVID-19 restrictions mostly lifted, the delta variant has surged almost exclusively among those who haven’t gotten the vaccine. Hospitalizations and daily cases have risen to their highest levels in months, and over 1,000 COVID-19 patients have been logged for the past six days in a row, according to state health data.