Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies programme, said on Wednesday that giving Covid-19 booster shots is like handing out extra life jackets to people who already have them.
Regardless of what agreement science comes to on benefits from booster doses, “the reality is, right now, today, if we think about this in terms of an analogy, we’re planning to hand out extra life jackets to people who already have life jackets. While we’re leaving other people to drown without a single life jacket,” Ryan said during a news briefing in Geneva.
“That’s the reality,” he continued. “Science is not certain on this. There is clearly more data to collect. But the fundamental ethical reality is we’re handing out second life jackets while leaving millions and millions of people without anything to protect them.”
Data consistently demonstrate a reduction of vaccine effectiveness against infection over time,” CDC director says
From CNN’s Jacqueline Howard
Three separate studies demonstrate how protection against Covid-19 infection that vaccines provide may decline over time, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a White House virtual briefing on Wednesday.
One of the studies, conducted in New York, found that vaccine effectiveness against new Covid-19 diagnoses declined from 92% to 80% over time from May 3 through July 25, based on the state’s vaccine records.
“This allowed New York to study vaccine effectiveness against infection over time for more than 10 million New Yorkers of all ages,” Walensky said, adding that the data will be published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) today. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Another study, conducted by the Mayo Clinic, analyzed vaccine effectiveness for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines among more than 80,000 people across all ages using data through July 16, Walensky said, adding, “Like we saw in the New York data, vaccine effectiveness against infection declined over time.”
The Mayo Clinic study found that effectiveness fell from 76% to 42% among those who received the Pfizer vaccine and from 86% to 76% among those who received the Moderna vaccine. “These data are currently available on a pre-print server,” Walensky said.
A third study, to be published today in the CDC’s MMWR, found that vaccine effectiveness against Covid-19 infection among nursing home residents declined from 75% in March to 53% in August, Walensky said.
