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Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday said he believes Johnson & Johnson should’ve doled out a two-dose COVID-19 shot — as health experts recommend getting a booster to the one-shot jab as soon as it becomes available. The White House chief medical advisor said that the unanimous decision Friday by the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel to recommend the booster shots should be welcomed news for recipients of the vaccine. (Salo, 10/17)

The single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine that last week won approval from FDA advisers for a booster shot probably should have been a two-shot vaccine from the start, the nation's top infectious disease physician said Sunday. "What the advisers to the FDA felt is that, given the data that they saw, very likely this should have been a two-dose vaccine to begin with," Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC's "This Week." The Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory panel unanimously approved booster shots for the vaccine Friday for all J&J recipients 18 years and older – as early as two months after the first dose. (Bacon and Santucci, 10/17)

Over the last year, the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine has been commonly referred to as a single-shot alternative to the two-dose regimens of mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. But meeting Friday to consider whether to recommend approval of a booster dose for J&J's vaccine, an FDA advisory committee unanimously concluded that a second dose should be administered and suggested that the vaccine performs better as a two-dose series. (Dunleavy, 10/15)

The optimistic turn in Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths could end in another spike in infections, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday. But the US could still prevent that spike with higher vaccination rates. "If we don't do very well in that regard, there's always the danger that there will be enough circulating virus that you can have a stalling of the diminishing of the number of cases, and when that happens, as we've seen in the past with other waves that we've been through, there's the danger of resurgence," said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, on Fox News Sunday. (Holcombe, 10/18)