“It is very likely that the immunity acquired by vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 and the potentially severe course of the disease (but probably to a lesser extent) will weaken over time,” she said in a SAGE document.
“It is therefore likely that vaccination campaigns against SARS-CoV-2 will continue for many years to come. At present, however, we do not know the optimal frequency of revaccination to protect vulnerable people from covid-19, “said leading scientists from the Royal University of London, the University of Birmingham and the Public Health Office (PHE).
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Britain vaccinates with coronavirus vaccines from AstraZeneca, Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna. According to the researchers, the protection provided by these vaccines can be expected to remain strong against the serious course of the disease. However, the effectiveness against a mild or asymptomatic form of the disease is likely to decline over time. This theory is confirmed by unofficial data from Britain and Israel, the authors of the document added.
The Israeli Ministry of Health recently published data on the declining efficacy of the coronavirus vaccine. The office said that protection against infection is now thirty-nine percent after vaccination, against the serious course of the disease 91% and against hospitalization eighty-eight percent. Pfizer and BioNTech originally reported more than 90% effectiveness of their anti-infection.
Countries are preparing a third dose
Israel has already announced that it will offer a third dose of covid vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech to people over the age of 60. Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog was the first to be revaccinated.
Demand for the third booster dose was high across the country, Israeli health organizations said on Sunday, the first official day of the vaccine’s introduction for people over 60. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has called on healthcare providers to apply the vaccination – available to all people over the age of 60 who received the second dose more than five months ago – even more quickly. He told the Times of Israel news portal that vulnerable people should be able to be revaccinated by the end of the month.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn wants to emulate Israel’s plan and intends to offer third benefits to very old people, people in need of care and people with a weakened immune system from September, the tabloid Bild am Sonntag said, citing a motion for a resolution by Spahn. presented to his colleagues at the provincial level. People who have been fully vaccinated with one of the viral vector vaccines (Oxford / AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson) should receive an mRNA vaccine as a booster dose this time, the proposal says.
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According to Bild, Spahn will also propose extending entitlement to benefits to minors aged 12 to 17. If this decision is taken, it will go beyond the current recommendation of the German Standing Vaccination Committee to vaccinate only minors with pre-existing diseases. On Saturday, Spahn said on Twitter that one in five Germans in this age group received the first dose of the vaccine.
The third dose is controversial
However, the journal Naturre pointed out that epidemiologists tend to warn against the third dose. According to them, this strategy could, as a result, harm the efforts to end the pandemic; each booster dose is a dose of vaccine that could instead be targeted at low- and middle-income countries, where most citizens have no protection at all and where dangerous variants of coronavirus could occur.
Also, statistics do not yet show that additional doses are needed to save lives, says Nature – with the possible exception of people with a weakened immune system, who may not develop a sufficient antibody response to the first vaccination. These are, for example, patients after transplantation.
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Covid vaccines are not likely to reach the world’s poorest countries until 2023. An internal analysis by the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that if the 11 rich countries that are either introducing booster vaccines or considering doing so this year should vaccinate all older than 50 years, they would consume about 440 million doses. If all high- and upper-middle-income countries did the same, this estimate would double.
The WHO says these vaccinations would be more useful in reducing the pandemic if they left for low- and lower-middle-income countries, where more than eighty-five percent of people (about 3.5 billion) have not yet received a single dose. “The priority now must be to vaccinate those who have not received a dose,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing on 12 July.
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