A health worker prepares a dose of the covid vaccine in New York, this Wednesday.Mary Altaffer / AP
The Joe Biden Administration has designed a plan to offer a third dose of the coronavirus vaccine starting on September 20, according to the main United States health authorities announced on Wednesday.
The ad is currently targeting only the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and will be available to Americans who received their second dose eight months ago.
The objective is to stop the spread of the delta variant of COVID, whose viral load is up to 1,200 times higher than previous mutations, and which has triggered the cases of infections in the country.
The initiative to offer a booster must go through a safety and efficacy evaluation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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Americans who received the single dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine will likely also need a booster shot, authorities said, but said they are waiting for more data to make the recommendation.
The White House is scheduled to hold a press conference on Wednesday to discuss the details of the plan.
A couple of weeks ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) called for a global moratorium on companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines so as not to put a booster dose, at least until the end of September, to alleviate inoculated imbalance.
“The available data makes it very clear that protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection begins to decline over time after the initial vaccination doses and, in association with the prevalence of the delta variant, we are beginning to see evidence of reduced protection against mild and moderate infections ", reads the statement signed by eight health authorities, including Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, for its acronym in English), and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "For that reason, we concluded that a booster injection will be needed to maximize the protection induced by the vaccine and prolong its durability."
Last week the FDA authorized an additional dose to immunosuppressed people (cancer patients, transplants or HIV patients, among others) at least 28 days after completing the regimen.
The federal agency approved the recommendation of the CDC, who argued that "[recipients] do not always generate adequate levels of protection after receiving a double prick from one of the two messenger RNA vaccines."
When the WHO made its request for a moratorium in early August, the US announced that it would not comply.
"We believe that it is a false election and that we can do both [donate and puncture third doses]," said White House press secretary Jen Psak.
The world's leading power is the one that has donated the most vaccines to vulnerable countries, exceeding 100 million.
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