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- Americans who aren’t eligible for a booster shot are getting it without proof of eligibility.
- Pharmacies and doctors’ offices aren’t asking questions, the Wall Street Journal reported.
- President Joe Biden on Friday said about 60 million Americans are eligible for a booster shot.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Americans who aren’t eligible for a COVID-19 booster shot are getting it without showing proof of eligibility in pharmacies and doctors’ offices, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Patients seeking a booster shot told the Journal that pharmacies weren’t looking for confirmation of eligibility, or without any questions asked from either the pharmacist or the online scheduling tools.
Debbie Hirsch, a 67-year-old retired teacher, told the Journal she was given a third Moderna shot at a CVS in New York by a pharmacist who didn’t ask her any eligibility questions.
She listed herself as immunocompromised on the CVS website when she signed up, even though she doesn’t actually qualify, the report said.
Lauch Hines, a 75-year-old retirement adviser in South Carolina, claimed local pharmacies said to just show up with her vaccine card, the Journal reported. And Michele Cozadd, a 46-year-old former technologist from Ohio, told the Journal she was given her booster shot without any questions from her pharmacist.
She said the scheduling app didn’t ask her if she was at risk or had a pre-existing condition, the report said.
“Some of the demand we’re seeing for boosters is the shadow of policies we’ve had before that failed to mitigate the spread of Covid,” Neil Sehgal, a professor of health policy at the University of Maryland, told the Journal. “Thousands of people are still dying each day.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he added.
Despite more than a month of messy debate around boosters, most adults in the US who got the Pfizer vaccine are eligible to get an extra shot, Insider previously reported.
Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and US Food and Drug Administration recommended the booster shot for qualifying groups.
But only those with select medical conditions like immunodeficiency or a recent organ transplant can get a booster of the Moderna shot.
President Joe Biden on Friday said about 60 million Americans are eligible for a booster shot, or they will be soon.
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