By Heidi Nicodemus
EVEN as fully vaccinated health-care workers start receiving today booster shots of the Covid-19 vaccine, they will be followed soon by the elderly and people with comorbidities, according to officials of the Department of Health (DoH) and the National Task Force Against Covid-19 (NTF).
Only three vaccines—produced by American pharmaceutical giants Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech and China’s Sinovac—were approved for what the health department called as “heterologous vaccine strategy” in its coronavirus pandemic response, which would allow a jab from any of the approved brands on fully inoculated individuals who may have been first injected with a different brand.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had earlier issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for these vaccines but the National Vaccination Operations Center (NVOC) has yet to release its guidelines for the booster campaign, including the period when best to administer the shot or the elapsed time between the last of their primary shot and the planned booster dose.
In starting to administer the additional dose for health frontliners, FDA chief Dr. Eric Domingo announced that they are also readying to start giving the booster shots to second priority individuals “who may fail to mount an adequate response to the primary series” because their immune response is weak. These include all senior citizens and adults diagnosed with immunocompromised conditions.
Domingo added that the third priority group, which covers persons, aged 18 to 60 who have comorbidities that put them at high risk of contracting Covid-19, are likewise being considered.
The government-run hospital National Kidney and Transplant Institute (NKTI) is one of the hospitals where the booster shots will be administered and around 300 of its staff are expected to receive the jab.
According to vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr., about 1.6 million booster doses of assorted brands have been allocated for health-care workers, while some 5 million more would be set aside for seniors and people with comorbidities.
Based on data from the NVOC, the A1 priority group (health-care workers) has been registered as reaching some 1.64 million individuals while seniors, or the A2 group, number more than 8.25 million and individuals with comorbidities, or the A3 group, were about 9.02 million.
Photo courtesy: Wall Street Journal
