Europe recommends Pfizer vaccine as booster dose

Drug Authority Committee Europe (EMA) on April 22 recommended the approval of Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty, as a booster shot for adults who had previously received another vaccine.

The recommendation from the European drug regulator comes days after the number of global COVID-19 cases surpassed 500 million, according to Reuters statistics. The number of new cases increased due to the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron with high transmissibility raging in many countries.

Several European countries are seeing a slow increase or decrease in the number of new cases. However, according to Reuters statistics published on April 21, there are 1 million new cases of COVID-19 in Europe every 2 days.

In the US and UK, the Comirnaty vaccine is approved for use as a booster dose after two injections of any other vaccine.

Some other countries have also started giving a second booster dose of vaccine to certain groups of people such as the immunocompromised and the elderly.

In March, the EMA said that there was still not enough data to recommend people get a shot vaccines repeat for the second time.

Last week, Pfizer and BioNTech showed that three doses of its vaccine provide significant protection against Omicron variant in healthy children 5 to 11 years of age.

According to Refinitiv data, analysts forecast sales of the vaccine to be $33.79 billion by 2022. The two companies have supplied more than 3.1 billion doses of the vaccine globally.