Arriving at a meeting with his counterparts in Brussels, he said “to the best of his knowledge” that the development of these vaccines was “delayed”. “So I don’t expect suitable new vaccines (for Covid-19 variants) to be available until the fall,” he said, adding that “September could be a target month.”
Fourth vaccination
“This is why it is so important that we do not wait for new vaccines to arrive that are suitable for the fourth vaccination,” he said.
Germany currently recommends a new booster dose (a fourth dose for those who have received two doses of the Covid vaccine) for people over the age of 70, especially those at risk and healthcare workers. The German minister wants the European regulator to recommend “a fourth dose of the vaccine for those over 60 years old,” stressing that, according to Israeli data, it reduces deaths by 80%.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) clarified on 17 March that the available data did not yet allow the recommendation of a new booster dose of Covid-19 vaccines for the entire population.
Regarding a new serum adapted for Omicron, the BioNTech lab on Tuesday indicated its intention to “publish the first data in the coming weeks” from clinical studies, according to a spokesperson for the German laboratory at the origin of the first messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine against COVID-19, developed by Pfizer. .