Is booster dose essential for everyone to prevent omicron?
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Hello, Is booster dose essential for everyone to prevent omicron? What do we know about those third doses of the vaccine so far? Are they safe and effective? Who are the people who may need them? And should the world be looking at booster shots at this stage of the pandemic?
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@rathin Well, first, I think we should distinguish what we mean when we say booster shots. What we're really talking about right now is, is there a need to get a third dose of a vaccine if you've already received your first two doses? And there are really three reasons why we might want to give an additional dose. The first is if you didn't respond, if you're in a category of people that didn't respond adequately to the first two doses that you received, we do have some information that for immunocompromised people, it may be necessary to receive a third dose because those first two aren't doing what they do in otherwise normal, healthy people.
The second reason why we might give a third dose is if over time the immunity that you received and achieved as a result of being vaccinated starts to wane, it starts to deteriorate or go down over time. And in fact, the evidence right now shows that the vaccines are holding up extremely well to protect you against severe disease, hospitalization or even death. So we don't see strong evidence leading to a need to provide a third dose for people who have already been vaccinated.