Moderna chief: People likely will need fourth dose in fall

The chief executive of vaccine-maker Moderna said Thursday that people are likely to need a second booster dose in the fall, especially front-line workers and those 50 and older, as their antibody levels wane.

People who received booster shots this past fall are likely to have significant protection through winter, Stéphane Bancel said at a health care conference hosted by Goldman Sachs.

But he said the efficacy of boosters could dip by next fall: “I will be surprised when we get that data in the coming weeks that it’s holding nicely over time. I would expect that it’s not going to hold great.”

The Israeli government released a preliminary study this week indicating a fourth dose of the Pfizerbiontech vaccine generated a fivefold increase in an individual’s antibodies a week after the shot.

Vaccine producers and governments of wealthy countries that have purchased sufficient vaccine supplies have urged residents to get boosted. However, the repeated pushes to administer shots to tens of millions of people worldwide have raised skepticism among health experts about the feasibility of regularly boosting the general population.

“We can’t vaccinate the planet every four to six months,” Andrew Pollard, chairman of Britain’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, told the Telegraph. “It’s not sustainable or affordable. In the future, we need to target the vulnerable.”

The booster campaigns in rich nations have also stirred criticism about depleting vaccine supplies for low-income countries.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cited vaccine inequity as one of the biggest failures of 2021 in a speech this week.

“While some countries have had enough … vaccines to stockpile throughout this pandemic, many countries do not have enough to meet basic baseline needs,” he said. The emergence of variants including omicron, which is driving up case counts to unprecedented levels globally, shows what happens when rich countries hog vaccine supplies, he said.

“If we end inequity, we end the pandemic and end the global nightmare we have all lived through,” Ghebreyesus said in a separate statement last month.