3rd booster dose will be effective in countering future variants of Covid, research shows

August  12, 2021:

With an increase in the number of people vaccinated, scientists and health experts are debating if and when the third booster dose should be administered to keep the Covid-19 spread in check. In a recent development, scientists have found that the third booster dose will not only be an effective way to protect people from the currently circulating lethal variants of the virus but also against the probable future variants, the Indian Express reported.

Scientists came to this conclusion by finding that as the number of doses of Coronavirus vaccines increase, the protecting antibodies against Coronavirus including against newer variants increase manifold. Scientists found that a single dose of Pfizer vaccine was less effective in fighting against the key variants but the number of antibodies increased many times over after the second dose and posed an effective fight against newer variants of Coronavirus. Scientists suggest that an additional booster dose of even the vaccines containing the original strain of virus, can prove effective against newer variants of the virus.

The research, which has been published in the Science Translational Medicine, relied on a small group of healthcare workers who had been vaccinated by Pfizer dose. Of the lot, half of the health workers had already been pre-exposed to Coronavirus. The researchers compared the antibody response among the health workers before they were administered with the vaccine, after their first dose and subsequently after their second dose.

Lots of countries which have vaccinated a substantial amount of population with both the doses are grappling with the question of the future course of their immunisation programme in view of the constant threat of a new variant of Coronavirus. Financial Express