On Tuesday, the European Medicines Agency, the EU’s drug regulator, expressed doubts about the need for a 4th booster shot of coronavirus vaccine and said there’s presently no data to support this approach as it looks for more information on the fast-transmitting Omicron variant.

According to Marco Cavaleri, the EMA’s Head of Vaccine Strategy, although the use of extra boosters could be a part of contingency plans, further immunizations after short intervals wouldn’t signify a sustainable long-term strategy. In addition, he expressed worries that a strategy booster doses every 4-months hypothetically poses the danger of overloading people’s immunity responses and leading to fatigue in the population.

Furthermore, Cavaleri said that additional data on the influence of Omicron on jabs and a better comprehension of the emergence of the current wave were needed to decide whether a vaccine targeting specifically the Omicron variant was needed.

The EMA official said it’s significant that there is a good discussion around the choice of the composition of the jab to ensure that they’ve a policy that isn’t just reactive, and try to arise with a strategy that would be suitable to avert a future COVID-19 version.

Booster Administered Like Seasonal Flu Vaccination

Earlier this week, Marco Cavaleri said that booster doses could be administered once or might be two times, but it isn’t something that they ponder should be repeated continuously. Instead, the additional shots should be administered just like an annual flu immunization.

Authorities in Xi’an, a large and capital city of Shaanxi Province in central China, have ordered two hospitals to briefly shut down due to reports they denied cure for critical patients in two occurrences. First, a ‘pregnant woman suffered a miscarriage’ after Xi’an Gaoxin Hospital’s personnel rejected to admit her because she didn’t have a valid coronavirus test. In the meantime, a lady posted on social media that her father died of heart disease after he was spurned treatment at Xi’an International Medical Center.

US President Biden Ramps Up Fight Against COVID-19

Joe Biden, the U.S. President, says he is ramping up the fight against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, domestically delivering free face-masks and a sum of a billion home COVID-19 test-kits amid the attack of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. But health equity groups say flooding one nation with tools wouldn’t fix this pandemic and that the rest of the world also needs assistance.

In a White House speech, Joe Biden said he realizes they’re all frustrated as they commence the New Year. It has been a long road, but they’re proceeding to get through this. In his new effort to combat the highly infectious Omicron variant, Joe Biden said that the administration would begin distributing face-masks to US people by the coming week. Moreover, now Biden administration plans to purchase 500M additional coronavirus-test kits, on the top of the 0.5 Bn he previously proclaimed.

President Biden just announced that our administration will purchase an additional 500 million COVID-19 at home tests, bringing the total number of tests that will be distributed for free to 1 billion. pic.twitter.com/Ze8NSyKaf9

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 13, 2022

Moreover, the US leader said that by the following week, anyone in America who wants free COVID-19 test-kits would be able to demand them online. In the United States, 15M coronavirus-tests are now being conducted a day, and there’re around twenty-thousand accessible testing locations countrywide.

Additionally, Mr. Biden said the US military is deploying about 120 physicians, and nurses to hospitals in six States where healthcare employees have been particularly overwhelmed by the new COVID-19 infections. It’s the start of the eventual deployment of thousands of military healthcare employees.

US SC Halts Coronavirus Jab Rule for American Firms

The United States Supreme Court has stopped a key push by the President Biden government to boost the country’s coronavirus inoculation rate, a requirement that workers at large firms get a jab or test regularly and use a face-mask on the job. Simultaneously, the SC lets the administration move forward with a coronavirus jab mandate for most healthcare employees in America. The court’s orders on Jan. 13 came during a spike in COVID-19 infections caused by the Omicron.

The SC’s conservative majority concluded the administration exceeded its authority by seeking to impose the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s jab-or-test rule on American companies with at least 100 employees. Over 80M people would have been affected, and Labor Department’s regulatory agency had projected that the rule would save 6500 lives and prevent 0.254M hospital admissions over 6-months.

Read Also: Original Two-doses of Pfizer Vaccine Aren’t “enough for Omicron” – Pfizer CEO