Last week, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said fully vaccinated people will likely need a third dose of the company's COVID-19 vaccine after six to 12 months.
Bourla also mentioned an annual revaccination.
Dr. Joseph Gastaldo is an Infectious Disease doctor at OhioHealth. He feels as if the announcement was a “distraction” and could lead to hesitancy.
“The first thing I have to say is that really that decision is not from the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, that decision needs to be made by professionals in public health scientists and researchers at the level of the CDC and FDA,” Dr. Gastaldo said.
He said with full transparency, he doesn’t know if that will happen down the road. He said research is still being done, but if it does, it’s nothing to be fearful of.
Dr. Gastaldo said while looking at the data so far from data released from Pfizer, their trial is 10 months out and in their trial they had over 40,000 people, half of the people got the vaccine and the other half got the placebo.
He said within Pfizer’s reports, at 10 months out, despite any surges and variants, “nobody in the trial” has contracted COVID-19.
In reports from both Pfizer and Moderna, he mentioned that antibodies are reported to last for six months.
“When they taper off, they don’t go to zero all of a sudden, it’s a gradual decline and that does not capture at all the other part of your immune system the T-cell response, so we have to be very careful when we hear these headlines,” Dr. Gastaldo said.
He said if people don’t understand the full context of headlines or reports, his fear is that that could lead to hesitancy or misinformation spreading on social media.
“I’d rather have the focus on the conversation on getting vaccines into people’s arms for the first time before we have these talks on whether or not they need a booster,” Dr. Gastaldo said.