President Joe Biden tentatively suggested Friday that people should plan to receive another COVID-19 booster shot in response to a new rising variant.
Biden, who is scheduled to return to Washington, D.C., from vacation Saturday, briefly spoke to reporters Friday following an exercise class in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
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“I signed off this morning on a proposal to present to the Congress requests for additional funding for a new vaccine,” the president claimed when pressed on a rash of new COVID-19 cases in the United States.
Biden said he “tentatively” plans to recommend people receive another round of shots but has not made a final determination yet.
There have only been 12 global reported cases of the new BA.2.86 variant. The new mutation does not appear to make people sicker than the omicron variant, though experts say it is highly contagious and seems to be more resistant to previous iterations of the vaccine.
Though only three BA.2.86 cases have been registered within the United States, the country is seeing an uptick in the XBB and EG.5 variants.
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“This is a radical change of the virus like what happened with omicron, which caught a lot of people defenseless,” Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said in a statement. “Even if they had a vaccine or prior infection, it could still get into them and infect them again or for the first time. We are facing that again.”
