Vaccination Status Can’t Ignore Jab Longevity and Performance

While it was good strategy to have several vaccines in Mauritius last year there’s quite a bit of local data available now to narrow down our choices until better and in some cases more classic ones become available or Covid morphs into an endemic. More information is also coming from the jab manufacturers themselves. 

For example, Gamaleya, which makes the mix-and-match 2-dose Sputnik V vaccine has recommended its booster jab (Sputnik Light) 6 months after the first vaccine regimen and an annual dose thereafter. This compares very favourably with the 3-month cycle that seems to be the destination with mRNA shots like Pfizer. 

With the Sputnik solution we’d be doing at most two more doses over the 18 months following the time we’d stopped being fully vaccinated. Stick with Pfizer and we could be looking at six or more extra doses before parliament is dissolved. We certainly don’t want that many additional boosters. And this for at least two reasons. We’ve all read the warning of the European drug regulator on how a fourth dose could overload our immune system. Do we even want to wonder about the very serious public health problems that could be waiting for us with an eighth dose from a technology that’s relatively new? Plus imagine the current mess at vaccination centres being multiplied by six over the next year-and-a-half.

There has also been the logical recommendation that the level of antibodies irrespective of how they ended up in the body – through infection or vaccination – is a much better yardstick to determine freedom of movement than settling for a uniform but unfortunately discriminatory vaccine-only-based metric. This has become all the more easier for a middle-income country like us to do after the WHO signed a non-exclusive licence agreement with the Spanish National Research Council for a Covid-19 serological tool last November. 

So yes, our jab portfolio should be trimmed but in mindful ways. That definitely does not include putting all of our vaccine strategy in the mRNA basket which would also be a pity given that Modern Portfolio Theory turns 70 in a few weeks. The more so that no cases of Mauritians who took these Russian shots and died because of Covid have been reported so far – which is consistent with the mammoth Hungarian study that concluded that Sputnik V was the best of 5 vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Sinopharm were the other four) when it came to preventing deaths and the second best to avoid infections. The political risks of screwing up this too are not non-negligible for Pravind Jugnauth either and pretty untimely as he completes his fifth year as PM on January 22.

P.S. There’s also a brand new study done at the Spallanzani Institute (Italy) which was published on Thursday that shows that Sputnik does a much better job in dealing with Omicron than Pfizer. Here’s a screenshot from Gamaleya’s Twitter handle.