A new stage in anti-Covid vaccination in France has just been taken: the High Authority for Health has given the green light to three latest generation vaccines, specially adapted to Omicron variants.
The first two will be administered in October in France.
They were developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech and still target the original strain of the virus but also the BA.1 variant of Omicron.
The third vaccine, developed by Pfizer and available in November, will also attack the original virus and the latest strain of Omicron, BA.5, which remains the dominant variant in current contaminations.
The doses of these 3 new vaccines arrive right before the new recall campaign planned for this fall, coupled with that against the flu.
Compared to the original vaccines, their expected clinical efficacy is at least "equivalent or even superior", according to the HAS, in particular against infection.
But it is still impossible to say to what extent.
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The Haute Autorité de santé maintains its recommendation to administer an additional booster dose in the coming weeks to people aged at least 60, to adults suffering from comorbidities, whatever their age, to pregnant women, to children and high-risk adolescents, as well as everyone living in their environment.
These new vaccines, which use messenger RNA technology, also arrive at a time when the number of contaminations in France has been increasing for more than a week (around 35,000 contaminations recorded in 24 hours at the end of September), suggesting a possible eighth wave of the epidemic, but the extent of which remains difficult to predict.
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