The European Medicines Agency (EMA) expressed doubts about the Covid-19 vaccination strategy with repeated booster doses at short intervals.
Marco Cavaleri, director of vaccination strategy at the EMA, said there is still no data to support the need for a fourth dose of coronavirus vaccine.
“While the application of additional doses may be part of contingency plans, repeated vaccinations within short intervals would not be a sustainable long-term strategy,” Cavaleri told a news conference on Tuesday.
The expert raised concerns that the strategy of offering booster doses every four months could overwhelm individuals’ immune responses. For him, if the need to apply repeated doses is proven, it would be better to space them out, as is done with annual flu vaccines in the winter period, instead of offering them at short intervals.
“Reinforcements can be done once, maybe twice. But they’re not something that we should think should be done constantly,” he said.
But in a related statement, the EMA also said that evidence indicates that people who received a booster dose have better protection against infection with the omicron variant than those who received only the first two doses or a single dose.
The World Health Organization (WHO) agrees with the assessment. The entity’s technical group said this week that “a vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is probably not appropriate or sustainable.”
Cavaleri spoke about the intention of some European Union countries to treat SarsCoV-2 as an endemic virus, but said that we have not yet reached that stage.
A disease is considered endemic when its prevalence is consistent and predictable in a given geographic region. Regarding the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, an endemic disease causes a flatter curve, without major peaks.
“No one knows exactly when the end of the tunnel will be reached, but we will get there. What is important, and what we are seeing, is that we are on the way to the virus becoming more endemic. But we cannot say that we have reached that status.” yet,” said the director.
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