Pfizer

Turkey's vaccination drive needs to be accelerated in order to reach herd immunity, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has said. 

Turkey's health minister announced on Nov. 3 that the country will start administering booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to people who received their second doses at least six months ago.

In a written statement following a meeting of the country's medical advisory council, Fahrettin Koca said the booster shots would be administered as of Thursday.

The United States can now start giving children aged 5-11 the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID vaccine, U.S. health authorities said on Nov. 2 in a move hailed by President Joe Biden as a "turning point" in the fight against the pandemic.

The United States on Oct. 29 authorized the Pfizer Covid vaccine for children aged five-to-11, paving the way for 28 million young Americans to soon get immunized.

The Turkish Health Ministry's Science Board will look into whether the COVID-19 vaccine could be administered to children aged between 5 and 11 after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Advisory Committee recommended the Pfizer/BioNTech jab for this age group.

The U.S. moved a step closer to expanding COVID-19 vaccinations for millions more children as government advisers on Oct. 26 endorsed kid-size doses of Pfizer's shots for 5- to 11-year-olds.

The number of daily booster shots given in Turkey is still too low, while the pace of inoculations for the first dose has also lost steam, an expert has warned.

Young people are appearing to be the main culprit for the spread of COVID-19 recently, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has said, noting that, however, most of the patients who are treated for the coronavirus in intensive care units are the elderly and those with chronic diseases. 

Some 5 million people who have already received two doses of the inactivated COVID-19 vaccines have skipped their third shot, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has said, urging them to get the booster shot as soon as possible.

Turkey is presently using both the mRNA vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and the Chinese company Sinovac's inactivated vaccine in its inoculation drive.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has announced that it will analyze data, including the results from an ongoing study, for a vaccine distributed under the name "Comirnaty". It is already approved for children older than 12 in the USA and the EU.