Booster vaccines may be needed to shore up the protection offered against Covid-19 due to the threat posed by new variants of the virus, public health officials have warned.
Concern is growing over more transmissible variants that have emerged in South Africa and Brazil but officials say yet more variants are likely to be identified over time.
“We may not necessarily need to go to annual vaccinations,” said Dr Cillian de Gascun, director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory. “But it’s quite possible we will need to boost our immunity over the coming years as the virus continues to evolve.”
Hospital Report
The “good news” was that the vaccines already developed could be updated “in a fairly short period of time”, Dr de Gascun told a National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) briefing on Monday.
He said the three currently authorised vaccines were effective against the B.1.1.7 vaccine that emerged late last year in England, and which now accounts for three-quarters of cases in the Republic.
But he said officials were concerned about the variant originating in South Africa, which was why we needed to prevent its introduction into the country. Eleven cases of the variant have been identified in Ireland, all of them related to travel. No community transmission has been identified.
No cases of the variant identified in Brazil have been found here.
Reduced protection
As the HSE began administering the AstraZeneca vaccine to healthcare workers on Monday, South Africa halted its use after a study showed reduced protection against mild or moderate illness in cases involving the variant.
But assistant chief medical officer Dr Ronan Glynn said it was "too early" to reach conclusions on the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine in protecting against the variant, due to the limited nature of the study.
He urged people to take one of the Covid-19 vaccines as soon as the opportunity arises. “It’s the single best thing you can do to protect you and your family,” he said.
Officials said no immediate changes to visiting arrangements for nursing home residents were planned, despite the ongoing vaccination programme.
Dr Glynn declined to say when fully vaccinated people would be able to visit fully vaccinated nursing home residents, saying he wanted to see inoculation of the two priority groups – healthcare workers and nursing home residents – completed first.
The “intention” of officials was that the worst of the disease had passed for this year, Dr Glynn said, with no repeat of what happened in January likely.
There were many reasons for optimism, including the co-operation of the public, the rollout of vaccines, the approach of a better period of weather, allowing more outdoor activity, he said.
However, there remained a number of unknowns around transmissibility and the potential for introducing new variants which could alter the course of the pandemic.
The challenge was to get case numbers as low as possible and then to keep them low, and to ensure cases are not being imported.
Nphet officials reported steady ongoing progress in reducing case numbers, which are forecast to drop to 200-400 by the end of the month. Six further deaths and 829 cases were reported on Monday night.
The number of patients in hospital has fallen to 60 per cent of their peak levels last month. So far, more than 230,000 vaccine doses have been administered.
