During the 40th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on Monday, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said that two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine are “not enough” for protection against the new Omicron variant.
“Omicron is a way more challenging target, so the two doses are not enough for Omicron,” Bourla said. “The third dose of the current vaccine is providing good protection against death and decent protection against hospitalization. So, most of the people that they are ending up in hospital [with Omicron] aren’t vaccinated. They are not people that they had the vaccine.”
“I think the question mark … is how long that protection lasts with the third dose. We have seen with a second dose very clearly that the first thing that we lost was the protection against infections, which, anyways, is not as good, as robust against infection [than] the third dose for Omicron,” Bourla continued.
“But then, two months later, what used to be very strong in hospitalization also went down. I think this is what everybody’s worried about,” he said. “This is why a lot of authorities here in the U.S., they recommend the fourth dose for those who are immunocompromised.”
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel has similarly pushed for additional doses of COVID-19 vaccines due to waning efficacy and the emergence of new variants.
“I will be surprised when we get that data in the coming weeks that it’s holding nicely over time — I would expect that it’s not going to hold great,” Bancel said last week, referring to the protection against COVID-19 from the vaccine. “I still believe we’re going to need boosters in the fall of ’22 and forward.”
