Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla said people “probably” needed a dose of Covid-19 vaccine within 12 months of being fully vaccinated. His comments were made public on Thursday but were recorded on April 1.
He also said it was likely that people would need to be vaccinated against the virus every year.
Annual Vaccine Dose
“It’s very important to squeeze the pool of people who can be infected,” he told CNBC’s Bertha Coombs during an event with CVS Health. He added that vaccines would be an important tool in combating highly contagious variants.
The comments come after Johnson & Johnson chief executive Alex Gorsky told CNBC in February that people may need to be vaccinated against Covid-19 every year, such as annual flu outbreaks, as certain different types of variants spread.
“Unfortunately, as [the virus] spreads it can also mutate,” he told CNBC on Feb. 9. “Every time it mutates, it’s almost like another click of the dial so to speak where we can see another variant, another mutation that can have an impact on its ability to fend off antibodies or to have a different kind of response not only to a therapeutic but also to a vaccine.”
New Variants
Earlier Thursday, Covid administrative chief at Biden administration, David Kessler, said Americans should expect to acquire protective jabs to protect against various forms of coronavirus.
Kessler told U.S. law enforcement officials That currently approved jabs are very protective but noted that new COVID variants could “challenge” the effectiveness of vaccines.
“We don’t know everything at this time,” he told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Response.
“We are studying the durability of the antibody response,” he said. “It seems strong but there is some waning of that and no doubt the variants challenge … they make these vaccines work harder. So I think for planning purposes, planning purposes only, I think we should expect that we may have to boost.”
In February, Pfizer and BioNTech said they were testing a third dose of their Covid-19 vaccine to better understand the viral response to new strains of the virus.
Late last month, the National Institutes of Health began testing a new vaccine from Moderna designed to prevent the problematic differences that were first discovered in South Africa.
