Last year in December, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that booster shots will be available for frontline workers and senior citizens aged above 60 from January 10, 2022. This came after India saw rising cases of coronavirus variant, Omicron. Also, that India had crossed its 150 crore mark for vaccination, booster shots made more sense since they will be given to more people and will provide more immunity.
In the meantime, while people line up for booster shots, it is being said that the government may reconsider the vaccination policy soon since they believe that the third dose may not be a good thing for all age groups.
As per a report by Time of India, an official said, “The booster dose should be reconsidered. Booster doses are not helping in countries where the third dose of the corona vaccine has been applied. In such a situation, we cannot blindly trust other countries. We have to look carefully at the situation of the epidemic here. Our decisions should be based on this.”
On Tuesday, January 25, experts from the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI) and the World Health Organization (WHO) held an important meeting where they discussed the use of booster dose and its effectiveness from the data collected from across the world.
Research in some countries has shown that the booster dose provides much more protection against the coronavirus while many other countries have shown that the antibodies decrease within a few weeks of taking the third dose.
Many experts believe that booster doses are not an effective long-term strategy. At the same time, WHO experts have already warned that repeating the booster dose is not a better strategy against emerging variants of the corona.
Source: dnaindia.com