With the Central government announcing a 10-point COVID-19 vaccination programme on Christmas, healthcare experts discuss if renaming the ‘booster dose’ as ‘precautionary dose’ would be more appropriate given  the need for a third dose after increasing number of cases, especially that of the Omicron variant. Welcoming the government’s decision to give jabs to adolescents aged above 12, the experts are now pushing to include all aged above two years for vaccines. 

Dr Subhash Hira, professor of Global Health at University of Washington-Seattle and pandemic control expert, said, “As new cases of COVID-19 started to escalate in main cities of India since December 20, the Union government announced the 10-point vaccination programme on Christmas day. Due to the slow process of sequencing for Omicron in 28 national genetic sequencing laboratories, India has so far recorded only 415 cases of Omicron. The epidemiologic picture of Omicron in India appears different from European and North America where 70-85 per cent of new cases are Omicron. This needs to be watched closely because vaccine efficacies of varied vaccine platforms are different.”