Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla believes that it will be necessary to receive a new booster dose of its COVID-19 vaccine (the fourth in total) due to the appearance of new variants of the coronavirus and that "the duration of protection It's not very long," he said in an interview on CBS this Sunday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicated in February that the vaccine's protection against hospitalization and death fell from 91% to 78% four months after receiving the booster.
Top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said the need for another booster dose "is being carefully monitored."
Cases in the United States have been falling for weeks, and all states have lifted or eased vaccination and mask mandates, but what is happening now in China and Europe raises fears of a new wave of infections from the new omicron subvariant spreading all over the world.
Workers line up to undergo a COVID-19 test outside an office building in Beijing. Ng Han Guan / AP
China reported 2,125 new cases this Sunday in 58 cities in 19 of its 31 mainland provinces, and adds more than 10,000 since the new wave in early March, the worst since the start of the pandemic in Wuhan at the end of 2019, according to the report. CNN network.
Following its "zero tolerance" policy, the Chinese authorities have quarantined two large cities (Changchun and Shenzhen) with a total of 26 million inhabitants, who are not allowed to leave their homes.
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These closures are affecting industrial production, aggravating the lack of supplies around the world, the main cause of runaway inflation in the US Foxconn, the largest manufacturer of Apple products in China, closed its factories in Shenzhen.
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The increase in infections is also affecting Europe, according to data from Johns Hopkins University: Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands registered a significant increase in cases last week, and in some cases, hospitalizations.
"The [new] wave in Europe could be replicated in the United States as well," Ogbonnaya Omenka, a professor at the Butler University School of Pharmacy, told USA Today.
In the United States, cases have fallen to less than 35,000 daily, the lowest rate since July, according to the CDC, but only 44% of the population has received the booster dose, essential according to medical authorities to deal with omicron.
Behind this increase in infections in China and Europe hides the new BA.2 variant of the coronavirus, nicknamed
stealth
, which some studies indicate is 30% more contagious than the previous one and accounts for 12% of cases in the US US, according to the CDC.