Coronavirus: Policy for new vaccine under discussion

The vaccination committee is meeting on Thursday to discuss the policies for the new ‘bivalent’ vaccine and the wider rollout for the winter campaign.

Cyprus has so far received 43,000 of the updated vaccines with 240,000 expected by the end of September, Constantinos Athanasiou, the health ministry’s communications advisor, told the Cyprus Mail.

He emphasised that vaccines are already available at the vaccination centres as normal, but as to when the updated vaccines will be administered is one of the matters being discussed by the committee.

He explained that the updated vaccines will be offered as a booster dose while the original vaccines will be primarily given to those who have so far not received any Covid vaccines.

Athanasiou said that the committee’s final decisions may be announced later in the day or perhaps even on Friday.

There has been confusion amongst many in the public as to whether they should get boosted with another original vaccine or wait for the adapted jab.

Stella Kyriakides, EU Health Commissioner, urged this week for countries to press ahead with their vaccination campaigns – stressing that there is “no time to waste”.

And on Wednesday night, at an informal meeting of EU health ministers in Prague, Kyriakides emphasised that priority for the new vaccines should be given to those over 60 with underlying health conditions.

Earlier in the week, she said that “already new, adapted vaccines against new variants of the virus are being delivered. Now we have to clearly communicate with citizens about the vaccinations and the protection they need”.

The UK was the first country to first approve the ‘bivalent’ vaccine in mid-August. Moderna’s latest vaccine, Spikevax, aims to tackle both the original strain, first identified in Wuhan in 2019, and the first Omicron variant (BA.1).

Experts have said that the original vaccines continue to offer strong protection against becoming severely ill or dying from Covid, but the latest vaccines are adapted to tackle the virus as it changes.

Elsewhere, Kyriakides urged that beyond vaccinations there must be strategies in place to robustly monitor the spread of the virus in addition to strategies for the return of “measures for public health” if necessary.