After months of wondering how long a COVID-19 vaccine will last, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla said Thursday that it’s “likely” people will need a booster of the vaccine within 12 months of being fully vaccinated.
"It is extremely important to suppress the pool of people that can be susceptible to the virus," Bourla told CNBC's Bertha Coombs during an event with CVS Health -- adding that vaccines are the power tools in the arsenal against extremely virulent variants.
Additionally, Bourla said it’s possible that people will need to be vaccinated annually against the virus, not unlike annual flu vaccines.
Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine is about 95% effective in preventing symptomatic disease in clinical trials, and earlier this month the companies reported that the vaccine is more than 91% effective against disease with any symptoms for six months.
Moderna’s vaccine was 94% effective in preventing symptomatic illness in trials, and 90% effective in real-life use. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was 66% overall globally in trials, and 72% effective at preventing disease in the US.
According to NBC -7 San Diego, earlier Thursday, the Biden administration's Covid response chief science officer David Kessler announced that Americans should expect to receive booster shots to protect against coronavirus variants.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that of the nearly 77 million people in America (23%) who’ve been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, several thousand have become infected anyway.
“Vaccine breakthrough infections were reported among all people of all ages eligible for vaccination. However, a little over 40% of the infections were in people 60 or more years of age,” the CDC said.
Kessler told U.S. lawmakers that although the currently approved vaccines are highly protective, new viral variants could "challenge" the effectiveness of the shots.
"We don't know everything at this moment," he told 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."