U.S. health officials on Friday cleared a third dose of Pfizer or Moderna vaccine for all fully vaccinated adults at least six months ago.
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The United States Medicines Agency (FDA) has indicated that this emergency use authorization is helping “to provide continued protection against Covid-19, including against serious consequences that can occur, such as hospitalization or death. “.
“This emergency use authorization comes at a critical time, as we enter the winter months and face an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations across the country.” , said Moderna boss Stéphane Bancel.
People aged 18 and over who received the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine in the United States were already entitled to a second dose, two months after their injection.
For people vaccinated with Pfizer and Moderna, the third dose was previously reserved for certain categories of the population only: those over 65 years of age, adults at risk of developing a severe form of the disease or those at high risk of the virus due, for example, to their work.
An advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) met Friday at midday to discuss this generalized recall, and simplified its recommendations, then signed by the director of this agency, Rochelle Walensky .
Experts on this committee felt that for people immunized with a messenger RNA vaccine, those over the age of 50 “should” be boosted, and that those between 18 and 50 “could” be boosted if they were. wished.
Experts considered that the expected benefits in terms of protection and slowed transmission of the disease as the end of the year holidays approach justified this decision.
Some even thought it possible that these vaccines could be considered as three-dose vaccines from the start in the future.
The United States authorizes since the end of October the “mixtures” of vaccines for the booster dose. Americans can therefore choose a vaccine different from their initial series for this new injection.
At least 31 million people have already received a booster dose in the United States, of which about half (17 million) are 65 years and older.
In practice, the vast majority of people vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna kept the same vaccine for the third dose, while the majority of people who received a first dose of “J&J” switched to their booster dose.
According to a presentation from the CDC, side effects after a third dose were somewhat less common than after the second dose.
The announcement comes amid an epidemic resumption in the United States, with an average of 85,000 new cases of COVID-19 daily (compared to about 70,000 at the end of October) and about 1,000 deaths per day.
Some US states, including California, had already started allowing booster doses for all adults, even before recommendations from health agencies, in hopes of containing the spread of the epidemic before the holidays.
In October, Pfizer reported the results of a clinical trial involving 10,000 people showing that a booster dose of the vaccine was 95.6% effective against symptomatic forms of the disease.
Efficacy results for Moderna are still pending, but one study showed that a booster dose did increase antibody levels.
For Pfizer-BioNTech, the dosage for the booster is the same (30 micrograms), while for Moderna, the booster is actually half a dose (50 micrograms versus 100 for the initial two injections).
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