The European Medicines Agency has followed the World Health Organization’s warning against taking booster doses of the Corona virus vaccine as a way to combat the pandemic, at a time when the mutant Omicron is spreading at an unprecedented rate.
And the European Medicines Agency said – yesterday, Wednesday – that repeated booster doses of the Corona virus vaccine may weaken the immune system and do not achieve its feasibility.
The agency indicated that repeating these doses every 4 months may eventually exhaust the vaccinators. This advice comes at a time when some countries are looking into the possibility of giving additional booster doses to provide more protection with the high rate of infections with the Omicron mutant.
On Tuesday, WHO experts warned that only giving booster doses is not a viable strategy to confront emerging mutants, and called for new vaccines to be more effective in protecting against transmission.
“A vaccination strategy based on repeat booster doses (of available vaccines) is not appropriate or sustainable,” the WHO’s Technical Advisory Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic said in a statement.
WHO statistics
Meanwhile, the mutant Omicron is spreading at a rate not seen in the world since the start of the pandemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus confirmed in a press conference on Wednesday.
Gebresus said that although omicron causes less severe symptoms than the previous mutant, it remains dangerous, especially for unvaccinated people, noting that the number of new infections with omicron in the world reached 15 million in the past week only.
With regard to vaccination programs in the world, the Director of the World Health Organization said that 90 countries in the world have vaccinated only 40% of their population so far, and that 36 countries have not been able to vaccinate only 10% of their population.
“Some of the obstacles we faced with regard to supplies are now beginning to disappear, but we are still far from reaching the goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the world’s population by the middle of this year,” Ghebreyesus said.
