Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, assured that a third booster dose of the covid-19 vaccine will “likely” be required within 12 months of complete vaccination for immunization to be complete.
“It is extremely important to suppress the group of people who may be susceptible to the virus,” Bourla told CNBC television in a statement released Thursday.
The executive also indicated this these doses will be an important tool to control the variants of covid that have been shown to be more contagious.
So far it is not known how long vaccines protect against covid-19, given the short duration of action of this product.
Pfizer recently reported that its Covid-19 vaccine was more than 91% effective against the virus and more than 95% effective against severe symptoms of the disease, and that this protection was maintained for at least six months after receiving the first dose.
Likewise, people who receive Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine, which is similar in composition to Pfizer’s, continue to show high levels of antibodies six months after the second dose, according to a study published in the scientific journal The New England Journal of Medicine. earlier this month.
Pfizer’s study showed that your vaccine appears to work in the same way against the variant virus majority in South Africa, one of the countries where the product has been tested.
Pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced on Feb. 26 that it would study the possibility of injecting a third dose into vaccinated people to try to increase protection against the most aggressive variants of the coronavirus.
Bourla then said that with this third dose, the antibody response could be boosted between 10 and 20 times and emphasized that just as people are vaccinated against the flu every year, they will have to do it against Covid-19 to be protected.
This new study focuses on two age groups, the people between 65 and 85 years old and those between the ages of 18 and 55 and will be selected from the group that already participated in the first trials conducted by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer in collaboration with BioNTech.
The University of Oxford has launched a new clinical study to determine whether vaccine doses can be combined and an adequate immune response obtained with two doses, regardless of manufacturer.
The researchers already have the participation of the vaccine from AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna and the US candidate Novavax.