Sep 1 (Reuters) – The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said Wednesday there is no urgent need to administer booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines at people with full regimen, citing data on the effectiveness of injections.
The comments follow a similar statement from the European Medicines Agency last month stating that more data on the duration of protection after full inoculation is needed to recommend the use of booster doses.
Real-world efficacy evidence shows that all vaccines licensed in the region have a high rate of protection against COVID-19-related hospitalizations, severe illness and deaths, the ECDC said.
But the agency added that additional doses may be considered for people who experience a limited response to the standard regimen, adding that these injections should be treated differently than booster doses.
Germany and France have announced that they will start giving booster doses to vulnerable and immunosuppressed people starting this month to protect citizens from the more infectious delta variant.
The United States has also begun administering a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines to people at immune risk.
The US plans to offer booster doses more widely from September 20 if the country’s health authorities deem it necessary.
(Reporting by Manojna Maddipatla in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni; Translated by Aida Peláez in the Gdansk newsroom)