The first question you may ask is whether my booster vaccine needs to be the same brand as my initial vaccine? There is to date not enough data to confidently conclude that it’s safe to mix COVID-19 boosters with different branded COVID-19 doses, and that’s why the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not yet endorse a mix-and-match approach.
According to Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), mixing COVID-19 vaccines as booster shots is a “dangerous trend.” Mixing the vaccines could be “a chaotic situation …if citizens start deciding when and who will be taking a second, a third and a fourth dose,” Swaminathan recently told the Washington Post.
As for the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “for people who received either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine series, a third dose of the same mRNA vaccine should be used. A person should not receive more than three mRNA vaccine doses.”
In other words, if the vaccines belong to the same vaccine type, experts believe there may be lesser concerns.
Morocco: Third dose officially announced
The Moroccan government has officially announced the launch of the campaign to administer the third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on October 1.
“Following the recommendations of the national scientific committee and international scientific recommendations, a third dose of the vaccine against covid-19 will be administered as part of the national vaccination campaign, which has experienced since its inception a positive momentum and a broad interaction of citizens,” said the Health Ministry in a statement, calling on both Moroccans and foreign nationals living in the country to participate in the third dose booster program.
The new announcement comes as government health officials continue working towards achieving target immunity rates against COVID-19 across the country.
Under the leadership of King Mohammed VI, Morocco continues to lead Africa in the fight against COVID-19. Strict health protocols and a proactive vaccination campaign has allowed the country to limit the impact of the virus, with nearly 20 million Moroccans having already received a first and second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Why take a third dose?
A booster dose is an additional dose of a vaccine given to someone after vaccination in order to build up enough immunity, however, that immunity is likely to decline over time.
“Those who are moderately to severely ‘immunocompromised’ do not build enough protection in the first vaccination, and a second dose can help build more protection against the disease,” according to the CDC.
With the emergence of various COVID variants, such as “Delta” and “Mo,” there has been some reasonable fear that the decline in immunity over time will reduce the effectiveness of previous vaccine doses, and the third dose may enhance immunity against new variants.
Dr. Azeddine Ibrahimi, the director of the BioInova Research Center and the head of Biotechnology Lab at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy of Rabat, discussed Morocco’s approach to containing the pandemic, and the effectiveness of the third dose.
“We need a third dose to remind the immune system to produce antibodies to contain the virus,” he explained.
Ibrahimi, also a professor of medical biotechnology at University Mohammed V in Rabat, wondered about the ways to persuade Moroccans to get a third vaccine dose, at a time when “we failed to convince thousands of Moroccans to get vaccinated with the first and second doses”.
The health expert acknowledged the difficulty of the health communication pedagogy, given that it is “one of the most difficult pedagogies directed to the general population, where it is hard to communicate health and medical facts because it depends on too much technical data.”
Who is eligible?
In Morocco, for the moment at least, the third dose will be administered first to frontliners and the elderly, or those with comorbidities, as was the case during the early days of the vaccination campaign. Therefore, if you do not fall in any of the categories mentioned, you are currently not eligible for an additional shot. International health officials advise people to refrain from getting booster shots until after eight months of their second dose.
The procedures and modalities for the third dose in Morocco, as well as more details about targeted categories, will be communicated at a later date, Morocco’s health Ministry explained in a statement.
To ensure that all Moroccans and foreigners residing in Morocco are protected against contamination, it is essential for them to join this campaign, said the same source.
Will we need more COVID vaccine doses later?
What makes COVID-19 so dangerous is that no human has ever been infected by it previously, which means no one is immune to it. The decision to administer a third dose to immunocompromised people was made after data showed that these groups were particularly susceptible to infections since they had little immunity from earlier vaccinations.
Scientists are still learning about the COVID-19 pandemic. There is still more research to be done on the timeframe of the vaccine’s efficacy to protect people. There are still questions to be answered about these vaccines in the coming months and even years, meaning that countries will need to adjust their vaccination plans accordingly.
How is the situation in other countries?
Booster shots were first introduced in Israel and Hungary. In both countries, regardless of which vaccine they had previously, anyone over the age of 60 is eligible for a third shot, but they will need to wait at least four months from their second vaccination.
For now, most European nations, the US, and the UAE said that third doses will be administered in the fall or, in some cases, have already begun administering them.
Since April, health care providers in France have routinely administered a third dose to people over the age of 65 and people with underlying health conditions, reported the New York Times.
As concerns grow about the spread of the Delta variant, Germany has also started offering COVID-19 booster shots to the elderly and at-risk categories on September 1, according to the French news agency AFP.
