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World Health Organization leaders asked wealthy countries on Monday to hold off on giving booster doses of coronavirus vaccines to their residents before people in other countries can even get their first doses.
“Some countries and regions are actually ordering millions of booster doses before other countries have had supplies to vaccinate their health workers and most vulnerable,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a media briefing.
“Instead of Moderna and Pfizer prioritizing the supply of vaccines as boosters to countries whose populations have relatively high coverage, we need them to go all-out to channel supply to COVAX, the Africa Vaccine Acquisition task team, and low and middle income countries, which have very low vaccine coverage,” he said.
Tedros said vaccine access isn’t always a question of ability to pay, and many under-vaccinated countries are willing to pay for doses as long as they can get them.
“When we say share, it’s not like giving it for free. I can bring you a long list of countries that are saying ‘We have money. Where can we buy the vaccines? Just give us the vaccines. We can pay for it,’” Tedros said.
“It’s becoming a two-tier system,” Tedros added. “That is dangerous. You have seen it, and everybody’s seeing it now — high income countries are starting to say, ‘We have managed to control it. It’s not our problem.’”
Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director with the WHO Health Emergencies Program, agreed.
“We need to decide what our priority is, and what part of ‘this is a global crisis,’ are we not getting? This is still a global crisis,” Ryan told the briefing. “If we move on to other matters,” he said, “I think we will look back in anger, and we will look back and shame,” he added.
“There’s some people who want to have their cake and eat it, then they make some more cake, and they want to eat that as well.”
WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said data do not yet support the use of booster vaccines or vaccine mixing, and that decisions about boosters should be led by research.
“It will be a chaotic situation in countries if citizens start deciding when and who should be taking a second or a third or fourth dose,” she said.
More on the possible boosters: Last week, Pfizer/BioNTech said they are seeing waning immunity among people who received their vaccine and said they are picking up efforts to develop a booster dose that will protect people from variants. But in an unusual move, two top federal agencies — the FDA and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — said Americans don’t need boosters yet and said it was not up to companies alone to decide when they might be needed.
Pfizer will virtually brief US government officials today about the potential need for booster shots of its Covid-19 vaccine.
