B.C. planning 'spring booster' campaign for those vulnerable to COVID-19

British Columbia will be offering "spring booster" doses of COVID-19 vaccine to those at higher risk of serious illness, health officials announced Friday.

The province is recommending the booster doses to those ages 80 and older, as well as Indigenous people ages 70 and older, adults who are considered "clinically extremely vulnerable" and people receiving long-term care.

"Those are people who we know should get a booster in the coming months," said provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry at a news conference.

"The focus will be on protecting people at highest risk of severe illness," she said. "They are also the people, we know, that their immunity – the protection that they get from vaccine or from combinations of vaccine and infection – tends to go down more quickly. It doesn't get as high in older people, and it tends to wane or decrease more quickly."

Henry said B.C.'s plan "pretty much" matches the recommendations of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization.

One area where the province is departing "a little bit" from the NACI's advice, she said, is in suggesting that anyone age 60 and older – and any Indigenous person age 50 or older – who has not yet had COVID-19 consider getting a booster dose as well.

Henry said this advice is based on the province's monitoring of "seroprevalence" data, essentially studies that look at how many people have some level of resistance to COVID-19 in their immune system.

"For people under age 50, as many as 80 to 90 per cent of people have some combination of protection from both vaccination and infection," she said, adding that this type of "hybrid immunity" tends to last longer than immunity induced by just one or the other.

Henry also noted that waning immunity is not an "all-or-nothing" proposition. Even as protection against infection decreases over time, protection against serious illness requiring treatment tends to remain, particularly for younger people, she said.

The provincial health officer added that people who have never been vaccinated against COVID-19 remain "at significantly higher risk."

"I encourage anybody who has not received the vaccine to talk to a health-care provider, talk to your pharmacist," Henry said. "It is not too late to get the protection that is going to help you for the years to come."

For those getting spring boosters, the province's advice is to do so at least six months after their most recent vaccine dose or infection with COVID-19.

Henry said this means vaccinations for recommended groups will begin ramping up in April.

She also said she expects to see another mass vaccination campaign in the fall, ahead of the next respiratory illness season.

"That may, over time, turn into an annual booster or an annual dose that we'll have to have before respiratory season," Henry said.

"Or, in my more optimistic days, I hope that with our vaccine technology, we might get a pan-COVID vaccine within the next period of time and maybe we'll only need to have a dose that will last us for longer than five or 10 years. That part is speculation. We don't know yet, and we keep learning about this virus, but that's what I think we're heading towards."