Christopher Aluka Berry via Reuters
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VACCINE – The United States authorized this Wednesday, September 22 the injection of a third dose of Pfizer’s vaccine against Covid-19 for people 65 and over, as well as for those at “risk”, including due to a job exposing them particularly to the virus.
The booster dose can be administered from six months after the second injection, the United States Medicines Agency (FDA) announced.
Between the ages of 18 and 64, those eligible for this booster dose include those at “high risk” of developing a severe form of the disease, including due to “frequent exposure” to the virus from exercise. their profession or their situation, according to a press release from the agency.
This decision could thus include “health workers, teachers and school personnel, employees of supermarkets and those in homeless shelters or prisons, and others,” said the acting chief of the FDA, Janet Woodcock, cited in press release.
If the categories of the population concerned are therefore broad, this decision remains a setback for the administration of President Joe Biden, who announced in mid-August that the reminders could be administered to all American adults without distinction.
The government has since been widely criticized for appearing to anticipate the decision of the scientific authorities, and has been accused of causing confusion.
Moderna and Johnson & Johnson expected
The FDA ultimately chose to follow the advice of its advisory committee. The latter, made up in particular of epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists, spoke out last week to limit the injection of a booster to certain categories of populations, in particular the elderly and health personnel.
This panel had justified its opinion by concerns about the risks of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, in male adolescents and young adults.
The FDA’s decision is an “important step in the current fight against the disease,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. His company, however, had filed an application for authorization of a booster dose from the age of 16.
A committee of experts from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), the country’s main federal public health agency, also met this Wednesday and Thursday to discuss the issue in turn.
The CDC must then publish detailed recommendations intended for professionals supposed to administer these third doses, which must in particular specify what exactly covers the term “high risk”.
The FDA’s decision differs from what was announced by Joe Biden’s government: the latter assured that a vast recall campaign for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would be launched from the week of September 20, to all Americans eight months after their second injection.
He then justified this announcement by initial data showing that the effectiveness of the two products began to decline over time in people vaccinated, as the time of the second injection wore off.
Recall campaigns in France and Spain
The government adviser on the Covid-19 crisis, immunologist Anthony Fauci, on Sunday rejected the idea that the decision of health experts was a setback for the government. “This has always been suspended for the evaluation of all data (…) by the committee” of the FDA, he told CNN.
According to him, the decision on a booster dose for the two other vaccines authorized in the United States, those of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, could be made in the coming weeks.
Moderna submitted early data to the FDA in early September showing the effectiveness of a booster dose, which has yet to be analyzed.
Johnson & Johnson, for its part, has just delivered this data on Tuesday.
Some immunocompromised people may already receive a third dose of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines in the United States since early August.
Other countries, such as France or Spain, have already launched recall campaigns aimed at part of their population. In Israel, the government has gone further: anyone over the age of 12 can receive a third dose of Pfizer’s remedy.
A measure that the World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly disapproved of, denouncing vaccine inequalities between rich and poor countries. According to the WHO, it would be both more ethical, but also more pragmatic from a public health point of view, to first vaccinate as many people as possible in the world.
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