No mixed Covid-19 booster shots for China until scientists are sure, top disease expert says

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

No mixed Covid-19 booster shots for China until ‘scientists are sure’

A mix-and-match strategy may even be better than a third jab using the same vaccine, but regulators must wait for confirmed data, Shao Yiming told CCTV

www.scmp.com

• A mix-and-match strategy may even be better than a third jab using the same vaccine, but regulators must wait for confirmed data, Shao Yiming told CCTV
• A virologist at the University of Hong Kong described China’s insistence on using the same vaccine as a booster as ‘conservative’

A mix-and-match strategy for Covid-19 booster shots could help raise immunity in the vaccinated population, but state regulators would need more scientific data before they could approve such an approach, one of China’s top epidemiologists has said.
In an interview with national broadcaster CCTV on Thursday, Shao Yiming, an epidemiologist with the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and part of the country’s Covid-19 vaccine response team, explained that a mix-and-match strategy – receiving a different coronavirus vaccine as a booster – could be effective in sparking a stronger immune response.