According to reports from the pool of experts of the WHO (World Health Organization) Technical Advisory Group for Covid-19, the Covid-19 virus will continue to circulate in the coming months, causing the emergence of new variants. The modalities in which this will happen and the characteristics of the variants remain uncertain at the moment, however based on the data of the protection offered by the original virus, the Group recommended administering booster doses of vaccine containing the Omicron variantas it could “probably” generate an antibody response.
The protection offered by vaccines, experts say, aims to reduce hospitalizations and deaths and contain the severity of the disease course. However, all the data available so far concern vaccination against the virus “which was identified from the first cases of COVID-19 in December 2019”. According to the Advisory Group, the uncertainty of the evolution of the virus would lead to the need for more extensive protection against the variants in circulation. Thus, the inclusion of the Omicron variant in a new updated composition of the vaccine could, in their opinion, be useful to administer as a dose booster. However, it is the experts themselves who declare that there are insufficient data to establish the certainty of the efficacy of such a vaccine. The antibody response activated by Omicron may be probable, but not certain.
A fortiori, data on the functioning of vaccines against further variants constitute at the moment only hypotheses. Although the efficacy of such vaccinations is only presumed, the group “strongly encourages the generation of clinical data on human immune responses to a primary series and / or a booster dose of Omicron specific vaccines, across different vaccination platforms” .
The CEO and founder of the German BioNTech, which produces the Pfizer vaccine, would also have argued the need to launch a vaccination campaign of vaccines against Omicron sub-variants already in the autumn, given their rapid spread. In his opinion, dwelling on an experimental phase at this point would be completely useless, given the similarity of the new vaccines to those already administered. To carry out clinical studies on the new vaccines, it would take up to 7 months.
In short, the vaccine is not there, the data on its functioning are only hypotheses but there are already those who foresee a mass autumn campaign that doesn’t even go through clinical trials. All this despite the already existing booster doses have been rejected by an increasing number of citizens, which is why Europe was already looking for a way out to limit supplies.
[di Valeria Casolaro]