That will quite likely be reasonably effective against future variants too, the scientist added.Pune-based Serum Institute of India, which manufactures Covishield, on Thursday sought approval from India’s drug regulator for a booster dose, citing adequate stock of the vaccine in the country and a demand for a third shot due to the emergence of new coronavirus variants.The government in a press briefing has said scientific reasoning for booster vaccine doses for COVID-19 is under examination but the priority is to ensure complete vaccination of the eligible population with both doses.Kerala, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh have urged the Centre to decide on allowing booster doses of the Covid vaccine diseased amid Omicron concerns.In Bal’s view, fully vaccinated individuals still show protection and nobody knows whether the Omicron variant will spread as rapidly as Delta did earlier and whether it will be more or less transmissible than Delta.”At individual levels, booster doses would result in boosting pre-existing response further, and this will certainly be useful, in principle, she said.However, current vaccines will still use the old reference strain-based vaccine, hence neither Delta-specific nor Omicron-specific boosting can be achieved by a booster dose, Bal added.Bal said the virus will continue to mutate, more so since a huge number of individuals in lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) and also in developed countries remain unvaccinated.Concentrating efforts on newer and newer variants for vaccine development does not appear practical, she added.Rath said while booster doses may provide some increase in antibody levels, how long that extra protection lasts is not known.Will that increase, as long as it lasts, contribute to some better protection against virus spread? Yes, but it will quite likely not be a very large effect. Will boosters of the current vaccines protect against future variants? The answer is, who knows? the scientist added.At least 36 countries are administering booster doses of the Covid vaccine, according to Our World in Data. However, the WHO wants the most vulnerable people worldwide to be fully vaccinated first.According to a study in The Lancet, six different COVID-19 boosters are safe and provoke a strong immune response in people who have previously received a two-dose course of AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccines.The vaccines studied were AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Novavax, Janssen, Moderna, Valneva, and Curevac.The side effect data show all seven vaccines are safe to use as 3rd doses, with acceptable levels of inflammatory side effects like injection site pain, muscle soreness, fatigue, said Prof Saul Faust, trial lead from the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, UK.Bal noted that boosters have more benefit psychologically than in terms of providing further protection, for common people, excluding vulnerable populations.”However, vaccinating people from the global south is very critical at this point. We have seen how rapidly Omicron crossed national and continental barriers to reach different parts of the globe.Unless pretty much everybody is vaccinated globally there is no way of sitting back, the immunologist added.India has administered 1,26,37,79,602 (126 crore/1.26 billion) vaccine doses so far, with 79,68,96,038 (79.6 crore/796 million) receiving one dose while 46,68,83,564 (466 million/ 46.6 crore ) receiving two doses.
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