UK Targets Third Dose Of COVID-19 Vaccine For All People Over 50 Years Old

Vaccine illustration. (Unspalsh / Steven Cornfield)

JAKARTA - The British government plans to provide a third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to all people over 50 this fall, to ensure that they are free from the threat of COVID-19 by the coming Christmas.

As reported by Reuters from Times, Thursday, May 6, there are two options being tested from the plan for implementing this third dose, under the supervision of Britain's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty.

The first option, a vaccine that is specially modified to deal with new variants. The second option is to use one of the three vaccines currently in use, Pfizer/BioNTech, Oxford AstraZeneca, and Moderna.

"We are not sure how long these antibodies will last, so booster shots seem to be a good idea", said one of the UK's COVID-19 doctors, Dr. Hilary.

Calls for a third dose specifically adapted to the new variant are getting more intense, after research published last week showed that a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offers insufficient protection against the new variant.

Despite these findings, researchers emphasize the current vaccine's efficacy, but the public should be careful about the level of protection a single injection offers.

To note, more than 34.6 million people in the UK have been given the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, out of a total population of 67 million people. The country of the three lions has an agreement of more than 510 million doses of eight different types of COVID-19 vaccines.