Vaccines will likely need to be updated every few years in the future, the expert says.
According to a prominent Israeli professor, that three doses of the vaccine are enough to protect against severe coronavirus for a long time, so there is no need for a fourth dose.
This is especially true for individuals who have been diagnosed with Omicron.
“We may need to update those boosters every several years, possibly every year, to adjust them to the prevalent variant, but we may well not need any boosters if future variants prove to be less virulent as we see with omicron,” Professor Eyal Leshem, an infectious disease specialist at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center told CNBC in a phone call.
“So it is possible that people who have had two or three doses of the current vaccines, and then been exposed during this wave to omicron or are exposed during future waves to other less virulent variants, will not need another booster at all.”
At the end of last year, Israel started giving fourth vaccine shots to elderly people, some healthcare workers, and people with compromised immune systems.
Leshem admitted that the scientific basis for Israel’s fourth-dose rollout was not as strong as it had been for the approval of booster shots, but he said specialists had opted to take the precaution in case of booster antibodies weakened over time, as they had after the first two doses.
“We really have very little scientific data to suggest that the fourth dose will add a substantially enhanced protection against severe disease and hospitalization,” he added.
“So it was a recommendation based on expert opinion, rather than a recommendation based on robust data as we would ideally like to have in clinical medicine. We use expert opinion when we don’t have evidence, and we do that all the time in clinical medicine.”
Other countries’ health officials are currently divided on the need for fourth doses of Covid vaccines.
The UK’s vaccine authority announced last week that there was “no immediate need” for a second booster shot, though the problem was still being looked into.
People who are severely immunocompromised should receive an additional dose in their first series of vaccinations, as well as a booster shot later on, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pfizer’s CEO told CNBC in December that fourth doses might be required sooner than envisaged due to the highly transmissible omicron type.
According to Leshem, the rate of severe sickness and hospitalizations could yet climb, as there is typically a gap between rising cases and their outcomes.
“However, we don’t think that we will see a sharp increase as we would expect with previous variants,” he said. Omicron variant appears “inherently milder in most people, and this may have to do with viral biology — its affinity to the upper airways as contrary to affinity to the lower airways, which causes pneumonia.”
He went on to say that Israel’s high booster shot uptake, as well as the country’s young population, were likely to keep any large increase in serious disease at bay.
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