US doctors urge people to get vaccinated against COVID-19

Ahead of the rollout of this fall's new COVID-19 vaccines, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention work group wrestled for months over whether shots should be recommended for all eligible Americans or only for some of the most vulnerable groups, CBS News said, Report informs.

The latter approach, for example, has been taken up by other countries like the United Kingdom, which is again offering their fall shots only to people at highest risk of severe disease, like seniors and those with underlying medical conditions.

But a panel of the CDC's outside experts ultimately voted Tuesday in favor of broad recommendations for the shots, thanks in part to CDC data finding that healthy, young and mostly unboosted Americans are still being hospitalized by the virus.

"There was some concern that the work group entered its deliberations this summer assuming that a universal vaccination strategy was the obvious policy choice, but I just want to reiterate that that was very much not the case," Dr. Matthew Daley, head of the COVID-19 vaccines work group within the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said at their meeting Tuesday. But that's where the data took them.

The updated shots, which were greenlighted Monday by the Food and Drug Administration, have been reformulated to target the newer XBB variants of the virus.

All Americans, including children as young as 6 months old who are eligible for the revised shots, are now being urged to get a dose ahead of the fall and winter virus season.