Americans who got the updated COVID-19 booster shots are better protected against symptomatic infection than those who haven’t — at least for now, U.S. health officials said Tuesday.

Updated boosters rolled out by Pfizer and rival Moderna in September have been a hard sell for vaccine-weary Americans. Only about 13% of U.S. adults so far have gotten a “bivalent” shot that targets the omicron strain and the original coronavirus. On Tuesday, White House officials announced a renewed push for more Americans to get the latest shots.

The first look at the new shots’ real-world effectiveness shows they work, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert.

Speaking at a White House briefing expected to be his last before he retires from the government at the end of year, Fauci said what “may be the final message I give you from this podium is that please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated COVID-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed about 360,000 COVID-19 tests given to people with coronavirus-like symptoms at drugstores around the country between September, when the new boosters rolled out, and early November. Researchers compared the vaccination status of those who wound up having COVID-19 with those who didn’t.

The new omicron-targeting booster added 30% to 56% protection against symptomatic infection, depending on how many prior vaccinations someone had, how long ago and their age, the CDC concluded.

People getting the greatest benefit are those who’d never had a prior booster, just two doses of the original COVID-19 vaccine at least eight months earlier, said CDC’s Dr. Ruth Link-Gelles, who led the study.

But even people who got a summertime booster of the original vaccine before seeking the new fall formula were 30% to 40% more protected than if they’d skipped this latest shot, she said.

“We think about it as the additional benefit or incremental benefit of getting one more dose, and in this case that one more dose is a bivalent,” Link-Gelles said.

The updated boosters target the BA.5 omicron strain that until recently was the most common type, an effort to build on the original COVID-19 vaccines’ protection as the virus continues to mutate.

The original shots have offered strong protection against severe disease and death no matter the variant, but protection against mild infection wanes. CDC’s analysis tracked only the first few months of the new boosters’ use so it’s too early to know how long added protection against symptomatic infection lasts.

But “certainly as we enter the holiday season, personally I would want the most possible protection if I’m seeing my parents and grandparents,” Link-Gelles said. “Protection against infection there is going to be really helpful, because you potentially would stop yourself from getting a grandparent or other loved one sick.”

Even protection against severe illness slipped some when BA.5 surged, the reason health authorities have strongly urged older adults and others at high risk not to skip the new booster.

To that end, the Biden administration announced a six-week campaign urging people — especially seniors — to get the boosters, saying the shots could save lives as Americans gather for the holidays.

The campaign echoes a call earlier this week from the American Medical Association and nearly a dozen other health groups for people to hurry up and get both the COVID-19 booster and their yearly flu vaccination. The flu has hit unusually strong and early this year. Combined with COVID-19 cases and other problematic respiratory viruses, hospitals and doctors’ offices are packed.

Some people may be reluctant to get vaccinated or boosted because of a torrent of misinformation about the shots despite evidence that they’re safe and have saved millions of lives.

“You can decide to trust America’s physicians or you can trust some random dude on Twitter,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 coordinator.

Fauci said “as a physician it pains me” that the country’s harsh political division has some people refusing vaccination for non-health reasons.

And he noted that while it’s important to for people to get the new booster, those most at risk if there’s another winter surge will be people who never got the primary vaccine series.

Adding to the uncertainty, relatives of BA.5 are now the the most common coronavirus subtypes. Lab testing from Pfizer and Moderna show the updated booster revs up people’s levels of virus-fighting antibodies, particularly against BA.5. The companies point to preliminary antibody evidence that the new shots also may offer at least some protection against the even newer omicron subtypes, despite not being an exact match.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — As the COVID-19 omicron variant surges across the United States, top federal health officials are looking to add a negative test along with its five-day isolation restrictions for asymptomatic Americans who catch the coronavirus, the White House’s top medical adviser said Sunday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now considering including the negative test as part of its guidance after getting significant “pushback” on its updated recommendations last week.

Under that Dec. 27 guidance, isolation restrictions for people infected with COVID-19 were shortened from 10 days to five days if they are no longer feeling symptoms or running a fever. After that period, they are asked to spend the following five days wearing a mask when around others.

The guidelines have since received criticism from many health professionals for not specifying a negative antigen test as a requirement for leaving isolation.

“There has been some concern about why we don’t ask people at that five-day period to get tested,” Fauci said. “Looking at it again, there may be an option in that, that testing could be a part of that, and I think we’re going to be hearing more about that in the next day or so from the CDC.”

Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said the U.S. has been seeing almost a “vertical increase” of new cases, now averaging 400,000 cases a day, with hospitalizations also up.

“We are definitely in the middle of a very severe surge and uptick in cases,” he said. “The acceleration of cases that we’ve seen is really unprecedented, gone well beyond anything we’ve seen before.”

Fauci said he’s concerned that the omicron variant is overwhelming the health care system and causing a “major disruption” on other essential services.

“When I say major disruptions, you’re certainly going to see stresses on the system and the system being people with any kind of jobs … particularly with critical jobs to keep society functioning normally,” Fauci said. “We already know that there are reports from fire departments, from police departments in different cities that 10, 20, 25 and sometimes 30% of the people are ill. That’s something that we need to be concerned about, because we want to make sure that we don’t have such an impact on society that there really is a disruption. I hope that doesn’t happen.”

The surging variant is ravaging other sectors of the workforce and American life.

Wintry weather combined with the pandemic were blamed for Sunday’s grounding of more than 2,500 U.S. flights and more than 4,100 worldwide. Dozens of U.S. colleges are moving classes online again for at least the first week or so of the semester — and some warn it could stretch longer if the wave of infection doesn’t subside soon. Many companies that had been allowing office workers to work remotely but that were planning to return to the office early in 2022 have further delayed those plans.

The White House Correspondents’ Association announced on Sunday that the number of journalists allowed in the briefing room for at least the first few weeks of the year would be scaled back because of concerns about the fast-spreading virus. Typically 49 reporters have seats for the daily briefing, but only 14 reporters will be seated under the restrictions. The White House limited capacity in the briefing room early in the pandemic but returned to full capacity in June 2021.

While there is “accumulating evidence” that omicron might lead to less severe illness, he cautioned that the data remains early. Fauci said he worries in particular about the tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans because “a fair number of them are going to get severe disease.”

He urged Americans who have not yet gotten vaccinated and boosted to do so and to mask up indoors to protect themselves and blunt the current surge of U.S. cases.

The Food and Drug Administration last week said preliminary research indicates at-home rapid tests detect omicron, but may have reduced sensitivity. The agency noted it’s still studying how the tests perform with the variant, which was first detected in late November.

Fauci said Americans “should not get the impression that those tests are not valuable.”

“I think the confusion is that rapid antigen tests have never been as sensitive as the PCR test,” Fauci said. “They’re very good when they are given sequentially. So if you do them like maybe two or three times over a few-day period, at the end of the day, they are as good as the PCR. But as a single test, they are not as sensitive.”

A PCR test usually needs to be processed in a laboratory. The test looks for the virus’s genetic material and then reproduces it millions of times until it’s detectable with a computer.

Fauci said if Americans take the necessary precautions, the U.S. might see some semblance of more normal life returning soon.

“One of the things that we hope for is that this thing will peak after a period of a few weeks and turn around,” Fauci said. He expressed hope that by February or March, omicron could fall to a low enough level “that it doesn’t disrupt our society, our economy, our way of life.”

Fauci spoke on ABC’s “This Week” and CNN’s “State of the Union.”

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The slow pace is frustrating health officials and a desperate public alike, with only about a third of the first supplies shipped to states used as of Tuesday morning, just over three weeks into the vaccination campaign. “Any time you start a big program, there’s always glitches.

I think the glitches have been worked out,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert told The Associated Press. Vaccinations have already begun speeding up, reaching roughly half a million injections a day, he pointed out. Now, with the holidays over, “once you get rolling and get some momentum, I think we can achieve 1 million a day or even more,” Fauci said.

He called President-elect Joe Biden’s goal of 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days “a very realistic, important, achievable goal.” It’s an optimistic prediction considering the logistical hurdles facing states and counties as they struggle to administer rationed vaccine supplies amid rising COVID-19 hospitalizations. Fauci pointed to California’s swamped hospitals and exhausted workers even before holiday travel and family gatherings added fuel to the outbreak.

Fauci estimated that between 70% and 85% of the U.S. population will need to be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity,” meaning enough people are protected that it’s difficult for the virus to continue spreading. That translates to as many as 280 million people. He said he is hoping to achieve that by the start of next fall.

The coronavirus has killed more than 356,000 Americans, and the next few weeks could bring another jump in infections nationally that “could make matters even worse,” Fauci said. The Trump administration had promised to provide states enough vaccine for 20 million people in December, and fell short even as states struggled with their role — getting shots into people’s arms, starting mostly with health care workers and nursing home residents.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 4.8 million doses of more than 17 million delivered had been used by Tuesday morning. That is probably an undercount because of delays in reporting, but it is far fewer than experts had hoped. Still, Fauci pointed to a celebrated moment in history to back up his projection of ramped-up inoculations: In 1947, New York City vaccinated more than 6 million people against a smallpox outbreak in less than a month — and “one of them was me as a 6-year-old boy.”

If a single city could do such mass vaccinations in weeks, “this is not something that is far-fetched” for an entire country, he said. “You can use school auditoriums, you can use stadiums. You can really ramp up the contribution of pharmacies.” At that stepped-up pace, the country could see an impact on infections as early as spring — and hopefully by early fall, “you could start thinking about returning to some degree of normality,” Fauci said.

Amid mounting frustration over the slow vaccine rollout, governors and other politicians are talking tough and in some cases proposing to bend the rules to get people vaccinated more quickly. Health care workers and nursing home patients are still getting priority in most places.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo threatened to fine hospitals that don’t use their vaccine allotments fast enough, saying: “Move it quickly. We’re serious.” Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina said hospitals and health workers have until Jan. 15 to get a shot or they will have to “move to the back of the line.” As of Monday, the state had given out less than half its initial allotment of the Pfizer vaccine to about 43,000 people. In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper called in the National Guard to help speed things up. In California, where just 1% of the population has been vaccinated, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he wants to give providers the flexibility to dispense shots to people not on the priority list if doses are in danger of going to waste.

New York’s mayor suggested vaccine eligibility be widened to get things moving. There’s no sign yet that a more contagious variant of the coronavirus first found in Britain — which forced England into another national lockdown on Tuesday — will outwit the vaccines. Fauci’s colleagues at the National Institutes of Health are doing their own testing to be sure, just as vaccine manufacturers are. While the variant has been found in several states “it is certainly not dominant,” Fauci said. “We don’t know where it’s going.

We’re going to follow it very carefully.” The more contagious virus makes it even more important that people follow the public health precautions Fauci has preached for months, including wearing a mask, keeping your distance and avoiding crowds. In addition, scientists are warily watching a different variant found in South Africa but not yet reported in the U.S. There have been reports that the mutation might make treatments called monoclonal antibodies less likely to work. Fauci said he couldn’t confirm that, but U.S. scientists will investigate.

LAURAN NEERGAARD AP Medical Writer

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