COVID boosters needed yearly for most vulnerable- WHO
BELGIUM: The World Health Organization (WHO) forecasts that people most vulnerable to COVID-19, such as the elderly, will need to get an annual vaccine booster to be protected against variants, an internal document seen by Reuters shows.
The estimate is included in a report, which was discussed at a board meeting of Gavi, a vaccine alliance that co-leads the WHO's COVID-19 vaccine programme COVAX. The forecast is subject to changes and is also paired with two other less likely scenarios.
Vaccine makers Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc, with its German partner BioNTech, have been vocal in their view that the world will soon need booster shots to maintain high levels of immunity, but the evidence for this is still unclear.
The document shows that the WHO considers annual boosters for high-risk individuals as its "indicative" baseline scenario, and boosters every two years for the general population. The document, which is dated June 8 and is still "work in progress", also predicts under the base case that 12 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses will be produced globally next year.
That would be slightly higher than the forecast of 11 billion doses for this year cited by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA), signalling that the U.N. agency does not expect a significant ramp-up of vaccine production in 2022.
So far over 2.5 billion doses have been administered worldwide, mostly in rich countries where over half of the population has received at least one dose, whereas in many poorer countries less than 1% has been vaccinated, according to Gavi's estimates.
This gap could widen next year under the WHO's most pessimistic forecast, as the need for annual boosters could push once again poorer nations to the back of the queue.
In its worst-case scenario, the U.N. agency says production would be 6 billion doses next year, due to stringent regulation for new shots and manufacturing issues with existing ones.
That could be compounded by the need for annual boosters for the entire world, and not just the most vulnerable, to combat variants and limited duration of protection.
In the more optimistic situation, all vaccines in the pipeline would get authorised and production capacity would ramp up to about 16 billion doses to meet demand. Vaccines would also be shared equitably across the world. - NDTV
source http://www.dailynews.lk/2021/06/26/world/252487/covid-boosters-needed-yearly-most-vulnerable-who
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