SOURCE: AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

GENE­VA (AP) — An ex­pert group con­vened by the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion said Tues­day it “strong­ly sup­ports ur­gent and broad ac­cess” to boost­er dos­es, in a re­ver­sal of the U.N. agency’s pre­vi­ous in­sis­tence that boost­ers weren’t nec­es­sary and con­tributed to vac­cine in­equity.

In a state­ment, WHO said its ex­pert group con­clud­ed that im­mu­niza­tion with au­tho­rized COVID-19 vac­cines pro­vide high lev­els of pro­tec­tion against se­vere dis­ease and death amid the glob­al cir­cu­la­tion of the huge­ly con­ta­gious omi­cron vari­ant.

It said vac­ci­na­tion, in­clud­ing the use of boost­ers, was es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant for peo­ple at risk of se­vere dis­ease.

Last year, WHO’s di­rec­tor-gen­er­al Tedros Ad­hanom Ghe­breye­sus called for a mora­to­ri­um on boost­er dos­es while dozens of coun­tries em­barked on ad­min­is­ter­ing the dos­es, say­ing rich coun­tries should im­me­di­ate­ly do­nate those vac­cines to poor coun­tries in­stead. WHO sci­en­tists said at the time they would con­tin­ue to eval­u­ate in­com­ing da­ta.

Nu­mer­ous sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies have since proven that boost­er dos­es of au­tho­rized vac­cines help re­store wan­ing im­mu­ni­ty and pro­tect against se­ri­ous COVID-19. Boost­er pro­grams in rich coun­tries in­clud­ing Britain, Cana­da and the U.S. have been cred­it­ed with pre­vent­ing the surge in omi­cron in­fec­tions from spilling over in­to hos­pi­tals and ceme­ter­ies.

WHO said it is con­tin­u­ing to mon­i­tor the glob­al spread of omi­cron, in­clud­ing a “stealth” ver­sion known as BA.2, which has been doc­u­ment­ed to have re-in­fect­ed some peo­ple af­ter an ini­tial case of omi­cron. There’s mixed re­search on whether it caus­es more se­vere dis­ease, but vac­cines ap­pear just as ef­fec­tive against it.

WHO not­ed that the cur­rent au­tho­rized COVID-19 vac­cines are all based on the strain that was first de­tect­ed in Wuhan, Chi­na more than three years ago.

“Since then, there has been con­tin­u­ous and sub­stan­tial virus evo­lu­tion and it is like­ly that this evo­lu­tion will con­tin­ue, re­sult­ing in the emer­gence of new vari­ants,” the agency said. It added that coro­n­avirus vac­cines would like­ly need to be up­dat­ed.