Should I be vaccinated against Corona a fourth time?
New analyzes show the effects of the booster vaccination
Created: 05/13/2022, 09:24
By: Juliane Gutmann
The Standing Vaccination Committee recommends a second booster vaccination for risk groups.
However, studies from Israel indicate that there is no optimal protection against omicrons.
Immunocompromised people, over 70-year-olds and staff in care facilities should be immunized again after the first corona booster*, according to the recommendation of the Standing Vaccination Commission (Stiko).
The reason: The vaccination protection would be renewed thanks to the second booster vaccination.
But is that really true?
Israeli researchers have examined how the fourth corona vaccination affects the risk of disease
.
For their analysis, the researchers evaluated the data of 1,050 healthcare workers.
154 people received a fourth dose of the Corona vaccine from Biontech/Pfizer, 120 employees were boosted with the Moderna preparation for the second time
.
For each participant, two age-matched controls were selected from the remaining eligible participants, according to the study, published in
The New England Journal of Medicine
.
The second corona booster vaccination is currently recommended above all for older and immunocompromised people.
© George Christophorou/Imago
Fourth vaccination restores antibody levels, but omicron protection is low
Although the fourth vaccination with an mRNA vaccine stimulated antibody production, the protection against omicron was low.
As the medical journal quotes the Israeli study, three weeks after the second booster vaccination, the antibody titers were nine to ten times higher than before the vaccination.
Measured by the antibody titer, the effectiveness of the second booster was comparable to that of the third vaccine dose, quotes the medical journal Gili Regev‑Yochay from the Sheba Medical Center.
However, the researchers found that the fourth vaccine dose did not provide optimal protection against omicron.
The tests showed that the omicron antibody titer was 136.3 two weeks after the fourth vaccination with the Biontech preparation Comirnaty.
For comparison: Against the Delta variant, the titer was 638.3 and 1542.0 against the coronavirus wild type.
The Moderna vaccine showed similarly weak activity against Omicron.
According to the medical journal, one of the study leaders, Regev-Yochay, determined a vaccine effectiveness of the second booster against all corona variants of 30 percent for the Biontech product and an effectiveness of eleven percent for the Moderna vaccine.
The 4th dose had not demonstrably protected against infection, it is said.
"Our data support that a fourth dose of the mRNA vaccine is safe and reasonably effective (especially against symptomatic disease).
Comparison of the initial response to the fourth dose to the peak response to the third dose revealed no significant differences in the humoral response or in the level of omicron-specific neutralizing antibodies.
Together with previous data demonstrating the superiority of a third dose over a second dose,
our results suggest that maximum immunogenicity of mRNA vaccines is reached after three doses and that antibody levels can be restored by a fourth dose,"
conclude the Israeli researchers.
(jg) *Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA
