RNA vaccines

China on Feb. 12 said it had given "conditional" approval for Pfizer's Covid-19 drug Paxlovid to treat adults with mild to moderate illness and a high risk of developing severe disease.

The Greek Ministry of Health has announced that about 10,000 medics who have not received a booster dose of COVID-19 vaccine will have to take two rapid tests a week to work. This will be at their expense, Kathimerini reported.

Health Minister Thanos Plevris clarified that health workers who do not have a booster will not be removed, as is the case with the unvaccinated.

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has called on the public to avoid complacency and believing that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 causes a milder disease, urging everyone to get their booster shots.

"We are fighting a variant of the virus that spreads rapidly and causes a milder course of the disease. This should not be passed onto you as complacency," Koca said on Twitter.

The Pfizer vaccine triples the likelihood of developing various forms of inflammation of the heart tissue, but these side effects are extremely rare. This was established by an international team of scientists, and their findings were published in an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Turkey has started to give the locally developed inactivated vaccine, Turkovac, as a booster shot to those who have already received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA jab.

According to studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, vaccine protection has dropped to 94% during the Delta variant and to 82% during Omicron. These are the first 3 major studies looking at the extent to which vaccines protect against Omicron.

"I hope that another type of vaccine will be developed soon, according to the classic method, long-lasting vaccines, multifactorial, which with one injection will completely protect us from current and future variants of the coronavirus."

This was said on BNR by the infectious disease specialist Prof. Georgi Popov from Sofiamed University Hospital.

Professor of Health Policy at LSE Elias Mosialos wrote on the approval of the coronavirus vaccine for children and specifically for the ages of 5 to 11 years, the , by posting an extended message on his personal Facebook account.

Prof. Mosialos refers to the clinical trials that were carried out until the licensing of vaccines for children aged 5 to 11 years.

"Over 90% of the victims of COVID-19 in our Bulgaria are elderly unvaccinated citizens. It is normal when launching a new product, such as Covid-19 vaccines, that every doctor wants indisputable evidence of its safety and effectiveness. One year later, we have no reason to doubt.

The coronavirus variant Omicron may partially evade protection from two doses of vaccine produced by Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech, Alex Seagal, head of research at a South African laboratory, told Reuters on Tuesday.