Media reports revealed that the United States is heading to give a third dose of the Corona vaccine to all those who received the previous two doses, starting in mid-September.
Reuters quoted a source who said he was familiar with the discussions that the Biden administration plans to start giving booster doses of the anti-Covid-19 vaccine by mid- or late-September, noting that this decision is pending approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
The source confirmed that health officials in the Biden administration agreed that most people should receive a booster dose of the vaccine eight months after completing the first vaccination.
According to the New York Times, officials plan to announce the administration's decision soon, and the first booster doses will likely go to nursing home residents and health care workers, followed by the elderly.
US regulators have allowed a third dose of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to be administered to people with weakened immune systems, who may have had weaker protection after receiving the two doses, with the aim of giving them additional protection against the delta variant.
It is also expected that those who received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine will also need an additional dose.
The Associated Press quoted experts as saying that the new direction of the Biden administration is to provide a booster dose to all vaccinated people, regardless of age, eight months after receiving the second dose, to ensure permanent protection against the Corona virus, in light of the spread of the highly contagious delta mutant.
The agency indicated that the third dose will make the US administration face a new challenge, especially as it struggled for months to persuade Americans to obtain the initial vaccination, which means that it will face another challenge to convince those who received the two doses to obtain a third dose.
Experts fear a new campaign calling for booster doses could overwhelm the ongoing campaign to win over tens of millions of Americans who are skeptical or reluctant to get their first doses.
They warned that demanding a third dose might discourage people who were skeptical about the vaccine's efficacy and reluctant to receive the first doses.
Officials emphasized that the booster-dose step is prompted by efforts to counter the threats of the highly contagious delta variant, and preliminary evidence that the vaccine's protective effect begins to decline within months.
This comes at a time when the delta variant is spreading aggressively among non-vaccinated communities, while causing an increasing number of infections among fully vaccinated people.
Studies indicate that the vaccine still protects greatly from the new variant, but the results issued by Israel indicate that the effect of the vaccine is waning, as its effectiveness against the virus reached a peak at 96% two months after receiving the second dose, but after four months the effectiveness decreased to 90%, and by six months the percentage had dropped to about 84%.
More than 198 million Americans have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, about 70 percent of those eligible to receive the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than 168 million have been fully vaccinated.
0 Comments