Will there be a third dose of the anti-covid vaccine? Not for the moment, answers the Haute Autorité de Santé. She believes in a notice published on July 16 that this recall has to date “no place“to be offered to”the entire population, apart from the most vulnerable and the oldest“, for lack of “available data“.

She thus joins the opinion of the Scientific Council, which proposed on July 8, to “anticipate a vaccination booster now ” but only “in people over 80 living in nursing homes or at home“.

No data on the impact of a recall

For the general population, “While it seems very likely that a booster injection will actually provide a boost effect (…), the data available to date do not allow a precise assessment of the impact or the need for such a booster on prevention vaccine failures“, argues the health authority. A vaccine failure is defined as the occurrence of a covid infection in a vaccinated person, more than two weeks after the second dose.

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Priority to first doses

But for HAS, “the priority for the next few weeks“is not the injection of a third, but the increase in vaccination coverage,”especially in people over 80 years old“only 75% vaccinated”despite their great vulnerability to illness“.

A reminder in case of vaccine failure

Generalizing a third dose to the entire population is not excluded by the HAS which specifies that such a vaccine booster would be considered “whether a decrease in protection against covid-19 over time was demonstrated on the basis of vaccine failures observed in real life (and not only on the basis of a drop in the level of antibodies) or if a new a variant “resistant” to currently available vaccines was emerging in the region“.

But in order to spot these situations and act accordingly, you have to watch out for “infections in fully vaccinated people“but also to launch studies on the efficacy and tolerance of an additional injection.