F.D.A. Panel Unanimously Recommends Johnson & Johnson Booster Shots

WASHINGTON — A key federal advisory committee voted unanimously Friday to recommend Johnson & Johnson booster shots, most likely clearing the way for all 15 million people who got the company’s one-dose coronavirus vaccine to receive a second shot.

If the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention accept the recommendation, as expected, boosters could be offered by late next week. But many committee members made clear that they believed Johnson & Johnson recipients might benefit from the option of a booster of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, something a top F.D.A. official said the agency was considering.

With a series of votes over the past month to recommend boosters for all three coronavirus vaccines used in the United States, the panel set aside significant divisions and skepticism about whether extra shots are needed and edged ever closer to the goal that President Biden laid out in August when he called for boosters for all adults.

Well over 100 million fully vaccinated people will be eligible for boosters if the F.D.A. and C.D.C. endorse the committee’s latest recommendations, even though some scientists say that the evidence supporting boosters remains weak and that it would have been wiser to focus on reaching the unvaccinated, including abroad.

Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine took a beating at Friday’s session, as did the F.D.A. for pushing for a decision without verifying all of the data that the company had submitted.

But the panel members appeared swayed by the argument that it would be unfair to deny Johnson & Johnson recipients an additional shot after endorsing boosters for recipients of the other two vaccines, especially in the face of evidence that Johnson & Johnson offers the weakest protection of the three.

“There is a public health imperative here, because what we’re seeing is that this is a group with overall lower efficacy than we have seen with the mRNA vaccines,” said Dr. Arnold Monto, the committee’s acting chairman and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “So there is some urgency there to do something.”

In its second successive day of discussion on boosters, the group wavered on whether it would be wise to soon offer extra shots to younger recipients of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

The government’s strategy now is to offer boosters of those vaccines to people 65 and older and to younger adults at high risk because of their medical conditions or jobs. No decision was made about broader eligibility criteria, but Dr. Monto and others described the issue as increasingly pressing.

The panel also seemed intrigued by preliminary data suggesting that Johnson & Johnson recipients may be better off with a booster shot from Moderna or Pfizer. Although no vote was taken, Dr. Peter Marks, who oversees the F.D.A.’s vaccine division, said regulatory action to allow boosters with a different vaccine was “possible.”

While…