Top U.S. health officials are urging Americans to get a booster shot on top of their two shots of vaccine against COVID-19, and now some countries are moving to a fourth shot.
Israel has kicked off trials of a fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine “in what is believed to be the first study of its kind,” Newsmax reports.
“The trial began at Sheba Medical Center, outside Tel Aviv, with 150 medical personnel who received a booster dose in August receiving a fourth shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The staff receiving the additional dose were tested and found to have low antibody levels. The trial came as Israeli officials have considered rolling out a second tranche of booster shots to its population as the country grapples with rising infections with the new omicron variant,” the news site said.
“Hopefully, we’ll be able to show here … that this fourth booster really provides protection against the omicron, which is highly needed,” Jacob Lavee, former director of the heart transplant unit at Sheba, told Newsmax.
Since the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, emerged, researchers have been studying it, finding out new things nearly daily.
For instance, researchers for a new study say Omicron appears to be milder than the Delta variant of COVID-19, leading to up to 80% fewer hospitalizations.
Of the people who contract the virus and are hospitalized, they’re also 70% less likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit or be put on a ventilator compared to those with Delta, The Daily Mail reported on the study led by South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD).
“So even though cases of omicron were less likely to end up in hospital than cases of delta, it is not possible to say whether this is due to inherent differences in virulence or whether this is due to higher population immunity in November compared to earlier in the year,” Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, told the Daily Mail.
Another study found much of the same. “A separate study out of Scotland, by scientists at the University of Edinburgh and other experts, suggested the risk of hospitalization was two-thirds less with omicron than delta. But that study pointed out that the nearly 24,000 omicron cases in Scotland were predominantly among younger adults ages 20-39. Younger people are much less likely to develop severe cases of COVID-19,” said the Associated Press.
“This national investigation is one of the first to show that Omicron is less likely to result in COVID-19 hospitalization than Delta,” researchers wrote, the AP said. While the findings are drawn from early data, “they are encouraging,” the authors wrote.
Neither of the studies has yet been reviewed by peers.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to [email protected].