As Israel begins rolling out fourth COVID-19 vaccine doses and other nations push booster shots amid the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant, some US health experts are questioning whether “forever-boosting” is an effective long-term strategy for dealing with the coronavirus.
Speaking with The New York Times, the scientists said periodically offering booster shots to entire populations does not appear viable, nor make sense scientifically.
“This doesn’t seem to be a sustainable long-term strategy, for sure,” Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona,
told the newspaper.
Beyond the medical effectiveness, they cited likely public vaccination fatigue, noting that while around 73 percent of adults in the United States have received two vaccine shots, only a third so far have gotten a booster. In Israel, which first began administering booster shots over the summer, nearly 6 million people have received at least two doses, while far fewer — over 4.3 million — have gotten a third.
“It’s not unheard of to give vaccines periodically, but I think there are better ways than doing boosters every six months,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, was quoted as saying, adding that there were other approaches to “get us out of this forever-boosting kind of a situation.”
Among the potential alternatives mentioned in the report were a vaccine specifically targetting the Omicron variant, a “pan-coronavirus vaccine” that targets parts of the virus that do not evolve; combining the current shots with nasal or oral vaccines that help better prevent infection by blocking the virus from entering the body; and waiting longer periods between administering doses.
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