Booster vaccinations against COVID-19 increase protection against severe forms of the disease, including infections from the latest mutations of the virus, but their effect wanes quickly, Le Figaro newspaper reported Tuesday, citing a study.
“Repeated doses increased protection against the risk of hospitalization, but this protection proved to be limited in time,” the publication quotes a report prepared under the auspices of the National Agency for Drug Safety and the insurance fund Assurance maladie.
The publication notes that this is the latest in a series of studies on the effectiveness of anticoviral vaccines since their introduction. Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines are mainly used in France. They have been shown to be effective against severe forms of the disease, although they “marginally reduce the risk of subsequent infection in the medium or long term.”
However, even for cases requiring hospitalization, efficacy tends to decline over time, causing the country’s health authorities to organize booster vaccination campaigns with the third, fourth and already the fifth dose.
At the same time, writes Le Figaro, there is still insufficient data on the real benefit of these sequential booster vaccinations, especially after the emergence of the Omicron strain, which has several varieties and more easily eludes protective measures.
