BY S.P.S Pannu

Britain is going in for administering a third booster shot of the Covid vaccine to 32 million adults starting next month to strengthen their immunity against coronavirus ahead of Christmas celebrations, according to a report in The Telegraph newspaper. 

Amid fears that the efficacy of the vaccines may begin to decline, an average of almost 2.5 million third doses a week will be delivered starting in the first week of September, the report said.

Israel is already going ahead with plans for giving booster shots to older adults in order to enhance their protection against COVID-19 and a number of other advanced countries are also considering a similar strategy to combat the pandemic.

But the WHO as well as other global-health researchers warn that this strategy could weaken the global fight to defeat the pandemic as the vaccines being allocated for booster shots should go instead to poor countries where less than 2% of the population has been vaccinated.

Also read: China’s Covid-19 vaccine flops in Singapore too

More dangerous coronavirus variants could emerge as cases surge in these countries which would make it difficult to defeat the pandemic. The sharp increase in coronavirus cases is quite widespread in Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and some Latin American countries due to an acute shortage of vaccines.

The failure of China-made vaccines has only created more problems, especially in the ASEAN region and some Latin American countries such as Brazil.

An internal analysis from the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that if the 11 rich countries that are either rolling out boosters or considering to do so this year were to give the shots to everyone over 50 years old, they would use up roughly 440 million doses of the global supply. If all high-income and upper-middle-income nations were to do the same, the estimate doubles.

The WHO maintains that these shots would be more useful for curbing the pandemic if they were sent to low- and lower-middle-income countries, where more than 85% of people have not got even a single shot.  “The priority now must be to vaccinate those who have received no doses,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press conference on July 12.

Also read: 114 doctors die in Indonesia in 1st fortnight of July as China-made vaccine fails to work

All of the COVID-19 vaccines being used in advanced countries reduce a person’s risk of hospitalisation and death by more than 90%. Scientists don’t yet know how much more a booster shot would protect the average person, although some data have started to trickle in. The effects of not receiving any vaccine are definitely more certain.