The CEO of Pfizer Inc. says he believes people are likely to need a third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
During a roundtable organized by CNBC in conjunction with CVS Health that aired Thursday, Albert Bourla said a possible booster shot would be administered six to 12 months after full vaccination.
Bourla added that he believes people may need to be immunized against the coronavirus every year.
“There are vaccines that are like polio with a sufficient dose … and there are vaccines like the flu that you need every year,” he said.
“Covid virus is more like the flu virus than the polio virus.”
During a roundtable discussion Thursday, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla (pictured) said people are “likely” to need a booster shot of the COVID-19 vaccine
The possible booster vaccine would be given six to 12 months when someone is fully vaccinated and Bourla said people may need to be vaccinated annually. Pictured: A nurse prepares a dose of the Pfizer vaccine on April 15th
Recently, updates to clinical trials showed that the Pfizer vaccine was more than 90 effective in preventing COVID-19 six months after the second dose.
However, more data are needed to determine if the protection lasts more than six months.
“It is extremely important to suppress the group of people who may be susceptible to the virus,” Bourla said during the segment, which was recorded on April 1st.
Earlier Thursday, Dr. David Kessler, chief scientist of the Biden administration, said Americans should expect to receive booster shots, especially as the variant continues to spread.
“We are studying the durability of the antibody response,” he said during testimony before the house’s selective subcommittee on the coronavirus response.
‘It sounds strong, but there’s a certain decrease in that and no doubt the variants challenge … make these vaccines work more. Therefore, I think that only for planning purposes, we should only hope that we should increase ”.
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech began studying a third dose of their vaccine in late February.
The booster shot aims to protect against future variants, which may be better at preventing vaccine antibodies than previous strains of the virus.
About 144 volunteers will be given the third dose, most of whom participated in initial vaccine testing in the United States last year.
The vaccine uses part of the genetic code of the pathogen called messenger RNA (mRNA), or mRNA, to get the body to recognize the coronavirus and attack if a person becomes infected.
In the jab, known as BNT162b2, the mRNA encodes all the spike protein found on the outside of the virus that it uses to enter and infect cells.
It was authorized for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after a clinical trial with 44,000 volunteers found that the shot was 95% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19.
Currently, more than 123.9 million Americans (or 37.3% of the population) have received at least one dose and more than 76.6 million Americans (23.1% of the population) are fully immunized. .
An average of more than three million people are vaccinated every day
However, the company’s current two-dose regimen produced a weaker immune response against the South African variant.
For the new study, researchers will examine volunteers after injecting the third dose a week later and a month later to see if they developed neutralizing antibodies.
Neutralizing antibodies not only kill invasive viruses, but prevent them from entering and infecting cells.
In March, Moderna and the National Institutes of Health also began testing a shot against the South African variant, hoping it will be available in the fall of 2021.
Currently, more than 123.9 million Americans (or 37.3% of the population) have received at least one dose with an average of 3.3 million shots a day.
In addition, more than 76.6 million Americans, 23.1 percent of the population, are fully immunized against the coronavirus.
