Covid’s risks are concentrated among Americans of Biden’s age.

Owen McGrath, 79, left, the same age as President Biden, signs paperwork to get his first Moderna vaccination, in the Bronx, in 2021.Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

By Benjamin Mueller

• July 21, 2022Updated 2:54 p.m. ET

President Biden is 79, and Americans his age and older have made up larger and larger shares of those dying from Covid in recent months. The virus has taken advantage of falling immunity caused by long delays since older people’s last vaccinations, and the Omicron variant has evolved a growing ability to skirt the body’s defenses.

Covid has been killing substantially fewer Americans of all ages this summer than it did during the peak of the wintertime Omicron wave. Still, older people remain at significantly higher risk.

As of early June, four times as many Americans aged 75 to 84 were dying each week from the virus, compared with people two decades younger, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Those death counts are provisional, the C.D.C. cautioned, because they were based on death certificates and did not account for all deaths in those age groups.)

That is an even bigger age gap than existed at the peak of the Omicron wave this winter. Then, the number of people aged 75 to 84 killed by Covid each week was twice as high as the number aged 55 to 64.

The president received a second booster shot in late March, significantly reducing his risk of severe illness. This spring, people aged 50 and older who had received a single booster were dying from Covid at four times the rate of those with two booster doses, the C.D.C. has reported.

In 2022, Covid deaths, though always concentrated in older people, have skewed toward older people more than they did at any point since vaccines became widely available. Many older people were vaccinated early in 2021, and among those who have not yet received a booster shot, immune defenses generated by the shots have significantly waned.

In contrast, middle-aged Americans, who suffered a large share of pandemic deaths last summer and fall, are benefiting from greater stores of immune protection from both vaccination and prior infections.

While Covid deaths remain far lower than in the winter, they are climbing again among older people as the immune-evasive Omicron subvariant known as BA.5 causes more infections, according to the latest C.D.C. data. From early May to early June, the number of Americans aged 75 to 84 dying from Covid each week increased by nearly 50 percent.

 

Biden had received a second booster. Here’s why it wasn’t enough to prevent infection.

President Biden received his second Covid-19 booster shot at the White House, on March 30.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Apoorva Mandavilli

• July 21, 2022, 1:18 p.m. ET

President Biden’s coronavirus infection is a stark illustration that the Covid vaccines, powerful as they are, are far from the bulletproof shields that scientists once hoped for.

Mr. Biden has received multiple doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine; his most recent shot, a second booster, was on March 30. Studies suggest that those doses will provide a powerful bulwark against severe illness — and indeed, the president has only mild symptoms so far after testing positive on Thursday, according to the White House.

But even booster doses offer little defense against infection, particularly with the most recent versions of the virus. What little protection they do offer wanes sharply and quickly, several studies have shown. In the president’s case, the booster shot he received nearly four months ago is likely to have lost most of its potency at preventing infection.

Earlier in the pandemic, experts believed that the vaccines would be enough to forestall not just severe disease, but also the vast majority of infections. And that was true when earlier versions of the virus, including the Delta variant, swept the globe.

But the Omicron variant upended those hopes. As more of the population gained some immunity, whether from infection or vaccines, the virus evolved to dodge those defenses. BA.1, the subvariant of Omicron that circulated over the winter, was adept at causing infections even in those who had received a booster dose of vaccine just weeks earlier.

Each subsequent avatar of the virus has become still better at sidestepping immunity. BA.5, which now accounts for nearly 80 percent of cases in the United States, is the most wily yet. Detailed data collected in Qatar suggests that immunity from previous infection and vaccines is weakest against BA.5 compared with its predecessors.

BA.5 is also highly contagious. The nation is recording roughly 130,000 cases per day on average; that number is likely to be a huge underestimate, because most people test at home or do not test at all.

The number of hospitalizations has also spiked over the past few weeks, although BA.5 does not appear to cause more severe disease than other forms of Omicron.

Given how much the virus has changed, the administration has been debating the value of authorizing additional shots of the original vaccine in the fall, and offering second boosters to adults younger than age 50. An advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration said last month that the vaccine manufacturers should make shots tailored to the newest variants.

But it’s unclear whether those shots will arrive in time to forestall a fall surge, and whether the virus will have once again evolved beyond their reach.