No one knows yet if a fourth coronavirus vaccination is going to be needed, but if it is, it won’t be a problem, Sheba Medical Center Prof. Eyal Leshem said Thursday, as Israel continued to experience an increase in cases.
“The fact that we can protect people using a safe and simple intervention like a vaccine is very reassuring compared to the situation we had in December 2020, when we could not do anything other than tell everyone to lock down in their houses,” said Leshem, the director of Sheba’s Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases.
According to him, there is no reason to believe that repeated vaccinations against COVID would cause any problematic side effects.
“There are many vaccines that we receive on a recurring schedule, including the flu one,” he said. “I do not think that there is any problem.”
In the past few days, Israel has been experiencing an increase in new cases. As of Thursday, there were around 6,800 active cases in the country, compared to 5,000 just days earlier.
Exactly 543 cases were reported on the previous day, compared to, respectively, 492 and 497 on the previous two Wednesdays.
Since cases began to rise, speculation has started to mount about whether immunity against the coronavirus offered by the booster is beginning to wane.
While the Health Ministry sent out a statement on Wednesday confirming that the data suggests the protection granted by the third shot is strong, in an interview with Channel 12 later in the day, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said it is not unreasonable to think that a fourth vaccination will be needed.
Leshem said there is no way to know yet if this will be the case.
“We are seeing a decline in antibodies, but this is natural,” he said. “We need to see what it means in terms of public health and clinical outcomes.”
In the past few days, 9% of the new cases were registered among people vaccinated with a booster. A month earlier, they were around 6%.
However, according to Leshem, this is simply a consequence of the fact that more people have gotten the third shot – around 4.06 million Israelis, compared to 6.28 million who got one shot, 5.77 million who got two shots, and around three million who are not vaccinated at all – including children.
“If we look at the data, those who got the booster are significantly underrepresented compared to the unvaccinated,” Lashem said.
When looking at serious patients, whose number has continued to decline, the difference is even more striking. There were 120 such patients in Israel as of Thursday, compared to 236 four weeks earlier.
Of those, 99 were not inoculated, six were inoculated more than six months earlier – and therefore not considered protected anymore – and only 13 were fully vaccinated.