A few days ago the US FDA authorized a second booster dose, therefore the fourth doseanti Covid vaccines for people over 50 and for some categories of immunocompromised people over 12 years. An extension of what has already been established previously for the most fragile subjects. At least four months must elapse from the third booster dose with any authorized Covid vaccine, but the fourth dose can only be done with Pfizer (over 12) and Moderna (over 18).
As for the European Union, it is expected in the week a shared indication on the fourth dose by the EMA and the ECDC, given that the main countries want to proceed in unison, avoiding chaos. This was announced by the Minister of Health Roberto Speranza, according to whom the second recall “it will not be for everyone but only for the immunocompromised and the frail“.
Actually in Italy the fourth dose is already scheduled for the end of February: the Technical-Scientific Commission (Cts) of the Italian Medicines Agency (Aifa) had authorized what is technically not a fourth dose but a booster dose for severely immunosuppressed subjects at the end of the primary vaccination cycle consisting essentially of three doses instead of two. The minimum time that must elapse from the last injection is always four months.
Alberto Mantovaniscientific director of the Humanitas Institute in Milan, explained to Corriere della Sera that it would be “desirable that one should be operated on in Europe unique and shared choice in this regard, avoiding that each country establishes different ages “. Speranza himself, a few days earlier, had said that “when we talk about the fourth dose, we are not talking about the fourth dose for everyone, but only for the most fragile groups, which are those who, if they encounter the virus, risk paying a higher price. “.
In the rest of the world there are cases of the United Kingdom, where the second booster dose is administered from 21 March to those over 75 years old, living in nursing homes or immunocompromised, in Germany (same scheme, with the difference that the age is raised to 70 years) and France (for immunocompromised, retirement homes and over 80s) with a recommendation to extend it up to over 65.
Then there is Israel which was the forerunner for the fourth dose for all, where after the start of the second recall campaign in January, for people over 60, the government slowed down. Several studies conducted in the country during the Omicron wave of recent months however, they confirm the effectiveness for the more fragile groups: the last, carried out on 563,465 people between 60 and 100 years of age, shows that mortality due to Covid-19 among the participants who had received the second booster was 78% lower than those who had only had one booster dose. Another article on the subject published by New England Journal of Medicineinstead, he found that the fourth dose on younger health workers had only ‘marginal benefits’.
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Source: Vanity Fair

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