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Tens of thousands of doses of the vaccine could end up in the garbage can. Immunologist Anne Spurkland believes these doses should end up in the hands of 80-year-olds, not in the garbage. Municipalities do not have enough people to vaccinate, so vaccines may be thrown away.
“It's tempting to think we should use them as a third dose. It seems completely pointless not to be able to use them. This is how the public sees it, including myself, says the immunologist, author and professor of medicine at the University of Oslo, Anne Spurkland.
The FHI refused to use the doses that would soon expire as the third dose, the so-called "booster dose". This is due to a lack of data on the safety of this application.
For example, Bergen decided to keep the 12 doses of Moderna that came out on September 000. They hope the company will extend the shelf life so that the vaccines can be used later.
Spurkland cites Israel as an example of a country where you can clearly see that the vaccine effect is diminishing over time - and the United States, where the FDA has just recommended a booster dose to people over 65.
"I don't think the FDA is taking risks, rather they base their decisions on sufficiently solid data," says the immunologist.
FHI has previously said a third dose may be necessary for older people within six months of being fully vaccinated. FHI will probably decide to give a booster dose to people over 65 years of age over time life also in Norway. So why don't they want to do it now with vaccines that may end up in the garbage, they are just waiting.
The third dose is more protection
Spurkland believes that healthy 80-year-olds who were vaccinated earlier in the year and are likely to already have weaker vaccine effects should be the first in line to receive the now-expired vaccines.
- Healthy 80-85-year-olds are those who survived the pandemic socially. If COVID-19 continues to pose a threat to them, and we have the vaccine, we should give them it and reduce their risk of getting them.
Anne Spurkland says several experts believe the third dose offers more protection. This means that we will be clearly better prepared for newer and newer variants of the virus.
- Until now, we believed that it would be necessary to adapt the vaccine to the new variants of the virus. It is comforting to achieve a similar effect with the already existing vaccines. This is because the immune system produces even more differentiated antibodies during the third immunization that better detect the different strains of the virus.
FHI does not have enough data
Denmark and Germany are among the EU countries that have already started administering the third doses. The FHI previously said that a third dose may be necessary for some social groups within six months of full immunization.
FHI's chief physician, Preben Aavitsland, says there are several reasons why FHI does not want to give a booster dose of vaccines, which will have to be discarded soon.
- We do not know if the third dose is beneficial for the elderly or will give them better protection against the virus. Then we don't know enough about the side effects of the third dose in the elderly. Finally, the three dose regimen is not approved by the Norwegian Medicines Agency.
On the one hand, we have immunologist Anne Spurkland who believes that older people will eventually receive a third dose, looking at developments in other countries. And he encourages Norway to use the doses we currently have that will end up in the trash. The FHI, on the other hand, understands this argument but wants to be more confident in their data before possibly implementing a third dose for the elderly. Fortunately, it seems that municipalities are able to use at least some of the doses to vaccinate unvaccinated people before their expiry date.
FHI ignores manufacturers' recommendations
Geir Bukholm, vaccination manager at the National Institute of Public Health, believes it is important to confirm side effects after the third dose when they are given to high-risk groups. It is already known that Moderna can cause more severe side effects than Pfizer.
"Giving an extra dose to the elderly, especially the oldest, can be life-threatening because a third dose can have more side effects than the previous two," Bukholm says.
Until then, FHI had repeatedly decided to go beyond the recommendations of vaccine manufacturers. Among other things, by extending the time between doses and by mixing two different vaccines, they still refrain from giving the third dose. They argue that in the two previous decisions they did not increase the risk of serious side effects.
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