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The European Medicines Agency, the European Union’s main medicines regulator, said on Monday that a booster of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine could be given to healthy adults at least six months after the second dose.
The agency said data showed antibody levels increased in people aged 18 to 55 with normal immune systems who received a third dose of the vaccine. He is still evaluating the booster injections of the Moderna vaccine.
The agency also said people with “severely weakened immune systems” could receive an additional dose of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines as early as 28 days after a second dose. An additional injection is expected to “increase protection in at least some of the patients,” the agency said.
The recommendation is based on studies showing that an additional dose of these vaccines could increase the ability to produce antibodies in organ transplant recipients.
In the European Union, vaccination campaigns are a prerogative of national governments, and each of the 27 member countries can decide whether or not to give boosters to all of their adult residents. Some EU countries, such as France, Germany and Belgium, started giving extra doses to the elderly and those with weakened immune systems last month, while the Czech Republic and Hungary have open this possibility to all adults.
Although the European Union has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with more than 73% of adults fully vaccinated, there is no coronavirus vaccine authorized for children yet. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control warned last week that the average level of vaccination across the bloc is not sufficient to prevent the spread of the virus if governments relax restrictions on Covid-19.
The agency said it was carefully monitoring the “very rare” side effects of a booster, such as inflammatory heart conditions, but at this time the risk was not known.
Decisions by wealthier countries to give booster shots while the rest of the world remains largely unvaccinated have alarmed health experts. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, has called for a moratorium on coronavirus vaccine boosters for people who are not immunocompromised before at least the end of the year.
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