The EMA (European Medicines Agency) declared on Thursday (9) that booster doses of the Covid vaccine can be administered in a “safe and effective” way just three months after the last injection.
“Although the recommendation so far is to administer booster doses preferably six months later, the data currently available support the safe and effective administration of a booster dose three months after the first full course of vaccination,” said Marco Cavaleri, in charge of EMA vaccination strategy.
This is possible when “such a short interval is desirable from a public health point of view,” Cavaleri added.
“Preliminary data suggest that it may be more contagious than the delta variant, but we currently don’t know to what extent omicron can replace delta as the dominant virus,” he explained.
Cavaleri also recalled that “it is too early to say whether the composition of vaccines needs to be changed” to combat the omicron variant.
The European drug regulator recently published that, if necessary, it could authorize vaccines adapted against the new variant in three or four months.
“Companies that market Covid-19 vaccines are required to present the results of their laboratory tests to determine the level of omicron neutralization,” said Cavaleri.
“But we have to collect more evidence to determine whether the spectrum of disease severity that the omicron causes is different from that of the other variants that have circulated so far,” he explained as well. “At the moment, we don’t have enough data on the impact of this variant on approved vaccines, but we are continually looking into the horizon to gather results on this.”
Pfizer and BioNTech, in turn, insisted on the effectiveness of three doses of their vaccine against omicron.
“Mild cases”
As the EMA also explained, the symptoms caused by omicrons in cases detected in the European Union “appear to be mostly mild”.
Still, the variant appears to have a higher reinfection rate in people cured or vaccinated, as the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday.
The EMA has already approved four vaccines, two antibody treatments and allowed the emergency use of tablets from the MSD laboratory.
“Over 600 million doses have been administered in Europe to date,” Cavaleri said. “We cannot lose sight of the fact that today we are better prepared than last winter to prevent and treat this disease.”
The EMA also recently announced that it had launched the accelerated study of the anti-Covid-19 vaccine by the Franco-Austrian laboratory Valneva, which uses more classic technology than those authorized so far in the European Union.
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