Give priority to adults for booster shots, Manila urged
MANILA: The government should ramp up its campaign to administer coronavirus vaccine booster shots to adults, or especially those “in the primary series” who have been fully vaccinated before considering giving these to minors, a health expert said on Thursday.
Dr Nina Gloriani, the head of a government panel of vaccine experts, was reacting to proposals that minors be included as the government on Wednesday started giving COVID-19 booster shots to about 1.8 million medical frontliners who have been fully vaccinated like nurses and doctors.
“We are not discussing that yet. Actually what we need is to ramp up our primary series of immunisation. We need to boost the number of individuals who already received the first two doses,” Gloriano said during a media briefing in a mix of Filipino and English.
Gloriani explained they were not worried over administering booster shots to minors who, she said, have a good immune response. Earlier, officials said they were studying the proposal to include minors, aged 12 to 17, in giving the COVID-19 booster shots.
“For children, we are not talking yet about booster shots,” she pointed out. “They have a beter response than adults. That’s why we do not worry about the waning vaccine immunity among minors.”
Aside from the COVID-19 healthcare workers, officials said also top in their priority list of COVID-19 booster shot beneficiaries are senior citizens, aged 60 and above, as well as individuals with comorbidities (or those with ailments like diabetes and hypertension).
In a related development, Dr Eric Tayag, the chief of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), reported they have granted emergency use authorisation (EUA) to Covavax in the batle against the pandemic.
Tayag said Covavax, known as Novavax in the US, is manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. “This is a new type of vaccine,” he said, “because it is what we call protein-based subunit vaccine. It replicates the antigenic part of the virus and then, it is injected to elicit immune response.”