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Saturday, February 15, 2025

Boosters may be needed despite third primary dose –Parasram

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1151 days ago
20211222

Peo­ple who re­quire a third pri­ma­ry dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine may al­so need to get a boost­er shot, ac­cord­ing to Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram on Wednes­day.

Re­spond­ing to a ques­tion from Guardian Me­dia dur­ing the Min­istry of Health’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence, Paras­ram ex­plained that a third pri­ma­ry dose is dif­fer­ent from a boost­er shot.

“The pri­ma­ry ad­di­tion­al dose is meant to get your pri­ma­ry se­ries up to a point where the im­mu­ni­ty that you have is con­sid­ered ad­e­quate and it’s usu­al­ly done to aug­ment to pri­ma­ry ad­di­tion­al se­ries for cer­tain in­stances. For ex­am­ple, in the im­muno­com­pro­mised pop­u­la­tion, those who are mod­er­ate­ly/se­vere­ly so. The dif­fer­ence be­tween that and the boost­er pro­gramme, again is re­al­ly an aug­men­ta­tion of a pri­ma­ry se­ries to bring you up to what the lev­el of some­one else who is not im­muno­com­pro­mised would have had,” he said.

He said while there isn’t yet the da­ta to back a fourth shot as a boost­er in these in­stances, it’s like­ly it would be need­ed.

“The da­ta is still out but at least from a the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tive, if you have an ad­di­tion­al pri­ma­ry dose mak­ing your se­ries com­plete it will there­fore mean that you will need an ad­di­tion­al shot as a boost­er,” he said.

“In terms of time­line, it will prob­a­bly align with what is go­ing on now mean­ing six months (af­ter the third pri­ma­ry dose) for most vac­cines two to six months for the John­son and John­son vac­cine.”

—Rishard Khan


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