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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said this week that third shots of coronavirus vaccines significantly reduced the risk that people who are immunocompromised would be hospitalized due to COVID-19.
In a Thursday study in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the agency said that – compared to hospitalized adults who had received two mRNA vaccine doses – the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and mRNA vaccines against hospitalization for patients with weak immune systems increased to 88%.
For immunocompromised people who had only had two doses, or a “primary series,” the vaccines were 69% effective.
Notably, the study was conducted when the delta variant was predominant in the U.S., whereas omicron now makes up nearly 100% of new cases nationally.
Limitations to these findings include that vaccine recipients in both dose groups were similar in terms of most demographic and clinical characteristics but may have varied with respect to exposure risk for infection, that vaccine effectiveness was not assessed against mild illness or infection, that vaccine effectiveness with a fourth mRNA vaccine dose in immunocompromised individuals was not assessed and that most three-dose mRNA vaccine recipients were vaccinated within several weeks of enrollment and durability of protection will require future analysis.
“Early evidence suggests that a third mRNA vaccine dose elicits markedly stronger neutralizing antibody responses to the omicron variant compared with responses to two vaccine doses, and increases [vaccine effectiveness] against severe disease following infection with the omicron variant,” the CDC wrote. “The effectiveness of three doses of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines against a range of disease severity associated with the omicron variant needs to be carefully evaluated in different populations.”
In January, regulators said adults could receive boosters at least five months after their second dose.
As omicron spread, the White House has called on Americans to get their booster and the CDC said that administration of a third COVID-19 mRNA vaccine dose as part of a primary series among immunocompromised adults, or as a booster dose among immunocompetent adults, provides improved protection against COVID-19 hospitalization.
Among adults with and without immunocompromising conditions who were eligible to receive a third dose of an mRNA vaccine, third doses were found to increase protection beyond that of a two-dose vaccination series for the prevention of COVID-19 hospitalization.
According to the American Medical Association, there are about seven million people with weakened immune systems in the country.
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