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About half a dozen other countries are exploring the idea. If those countries also start offering booster shots, “800 million more vaccine doses will be needed,” WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said in a press conference on Monday.
These doses should go to countries that have had little access to vaccines, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. It has condemned countries with middle and wealthy incomes for seeing third doses when first-time workers and adults in poor countries have not yet received their first dose. Some countries have not yet launched massive vaccination campaigns. “Currently, the data show us that the vaccine offers lasting immunity against the serious and deadly kobid-19,” he said. “Now the priority should be to include those who have not received the dose and protection.”
Craig Spencer, director of Global Emergency Medicine at New York-Presbyterian / Columbia University Medical Center, said it more clearly. “Whatever the pharmaceutical companies tell you, you don’t need an innovative Covid-19 more urgently than you need to get a vaccine more urgently than all the health workers in the world,” he tweeted.
That doesn’t mean we won’t have to in the end. “You may need boosters after a year or two,” WHO’s Swaminathan said. Wherry warns that being ready is good. But he has not seen any data to convince them that they are now justified. “The emerging data suggests that immunity is maintained,” he says.
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