Letters | The case for coronavirus vaccine booster shots in Hong Kong

Readers discuss the need for booster shots of the Covid-19 vaccine, criticise Hong Kong’s travel ban on residents returning from India and weigh in on Nicole Kidman vis-à-vis foreign domestic workers

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A queue at the Community Vaccination Centre at the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park Sports Centre in Sai Ying Pun on August 21. If no booster shots are offered soon, the vaccination programme will become a leaky bucket, with those vaccinated early on losing protection, especially against the Delta variant. Photo: Dickson Lee

Published: 7:30am, 26 Aug 2021

While the government deserves kudos for its vaccination roll-out, it should seriously consider administering booster shots before the end of the year. Many people are fixated on vaccinating 70 or 80 per cent of the population as a magic number for achieving herd immunity.

Unfortunately, the real world is not that simple. One major threat is the highly virulent Delta variant, which at least one health official has described as “like dealing with a whole new virus”, as it differs so drastically from the original.

Even more worrisome is the amount of evidence showing that immunity starts waning after six months or so even for vaccines such as the one produced by Pfizer-BioNTech, which was praised for its high efficacy. While there is no such data on the Sinovac vaccine, it could be worse, or we would surely have heard from the firm about the vaccine’s persistent protection.

We see new spikes in countries such as the United States, Israel and Iceland that have among the highest vaccination rates in the world and which have been portrayed as trailblazers in the fight against Covid-19. Sadly, hospitalisation and death also occur among the fully vaccinated in these countries, though to a lesser extent than among the unvaccinated.

If no booster shots are offered soon, Hong Kong’s vaccination programme will become a leaky bucket, where those vaccinated early on lose protection against the virus, especially the prevailing Delta variant. Therefore, the government should follow in the footsteps of Israel and Britain by offering booster shots to those fully vaccinated.

Criteria in deciding who would qualify could be based on age or the date the second jab was received (a bit like with issuing new Hong Kong identity cards).