An advisory to the US Food and Drug Administration unanimously voted last week, authorization of a booster jab. This third dose is of the mRNA vaccine of Moderna, and the second is for Johnson & Johnson's.
A ScienceNews report said millions of people who received either Moderna or J&J vaccines are expected to get their booster jab.
The said boosters are expected to be administered to select groups which will include people aged 65 years old and above, and those 18- to 64-year-old individuals with underlying conditions that put them at higher risk for severe COVID-19 disease, or those living or working in conditions that put them at high risk of exposure to complications from due to the illness.
Meanwhile, the same panel endorsed a second jab of the J&J single-shot COVID-19 vaccine for all those who received it in the same week.
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Doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine are packaged in a box at the McKesson facility on March 1, 2021, in Shepherdsville, Kentucky. The FDA has approved the third vaccine, and 3.9 million doses of J&J will begin distribution.
FDA Expected to Grant This Week EUA for the Boosters
Set to meet on October 21 is an advisory panel for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to discuss which populations are getting the additional dose.
As specified in the report, the FDA is expected to grant emergency use authorization for the boosters this week. As early as this coming week, Moderna and J&J shot recipients could be among the millions who were already given Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine and qualified for the booster shots in September.
These booster shots may be especially essential for older people with immune systems weakened with age and for people whose medical conditions put them at greater risk of severe complications of the infection.
While vaccines substantially lessen the chance of being admitted to the hospital and dying, millions of people are still found to be susceptible to the disease.
Chances of Vaccinated People from Falling Ill and Dying
This report indicates that fully vaccinated people can still contract COVID-19 and eventually die from it, although at quite lower rates than unvaccinated people.
For instance, former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state Colin Powell died a couple of days ago due to complications of COVID-19, although he was fully vaccinated.
According to a statement posted by his family on Facebook, 84-year-old Powell suffered from multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that wears down immune defenses against infections.
Booster shots may help enhance the immune system, particularly those of vulnerable people, probably providing adequate protection to ward off the worst complications of the disease.
Do Healthy People Need the Booster Shot?
During the October 14 FDA meeting, Moderna's therapeutic area head for infectious diseases, Jacqueline Miller, said that the vaccine's efficacy seems to be decreasing even for healthy individuals. For example, participants in a clinical trial who were given the vaccine of Moderna from August until December last year had from 34 percent to 40 percent higher chance of what the report describes as a "breakthrough infection" compared to those vaccinated in January until April 2021.
Still, experts have elaborated that getting shots of unvaccinated people, not the booster jabs to the vaccinated, will make a huge difference in curbing the pandemic.
According to the Children's Hospital Philadelphia's director of vaccine education Paul Offit, people admitted at the ICU are not there because they have not received their third dose. It is because they have not been given any dose at all yet.
Moderna and J&J Vaccines' Efficacy
In a preprint report in the Lancet on September 4, it was specified that the jab of Moderna remained 95-percent effective in terms of preventing hospitalization while its efficacy rate at preventing deaths is 97.9 percent.
Nonetheless, efficacy against any COVOD-19 symptoms was approximately 88 percent, while its efficacy against asymptomatic infection was 72.7 percent.
In February this year, when the J&J vaccine was authorized for use, it was roughly 85 percent effective at preventing hospital admissions and approximately 66 percent effective when it comes to preventing moderate to severe infection.
But according to a separate ScienceNews report, the increase in viral variants changed the figures. It said, in countries like the United States, for one, where the delta variant is dominant, the jab is still more than 70 percent efficient in terms of COVID-19 symptom preventions.
The number decreases to roughly 50 percent in South America, where there are COVID-19 variants including lambda and gamma, among others, that can escape parts of the immune system.
Report about the booster shots Moderna and J&J will offer is shown on CBS News's YouTube video below:
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