Expanded 3rd dose eligibility in Manitoba aims to keep health-care staff at work during 4th wave
Province using 'every tool in the toolbox to support the health-care system,' Dr. Joss Reimer says
Thousands of health-care staff are among the latest Manitobans now eligible for a COVID-19 booster shot, as the province tries to minimize the number of sick days those front-line workers will need to take during the fourth wave.
Studies have suggested the vaccines can protect against severe outcomes for months — but immunity against mild infections starts to decrease earlier, said Dr. Joss Reimer, medical lead of Manitoba's vaccine task force.
"If we weren't inside of a pandemic, we might be OK with a lower level of protection against mild infection," Reimer said at a news conference on Wednesday.
"But when we are facing a fourth wave and we do know that every health-care worker is critical to being able to provide services to Manitobans, we want to offer this booster to use every tool in the toolbox to support the health-care system."
The policy shift was first publicized Tuesday, when Doctors Manitoba informed its members via email that the province planned to expand its eligibility for third doses the following day.
All health-care workers and volunteers who have direct contact with patients, residents or clients are now eligible for a third dose. That includes First Nations health-care workers like traditional healers and knowledge keepers, Reimer said.
While the third dose is now recommended for many of Manitoba's 50,000 health-care workers, it's voluntary, Reimer said. The province hasn't changed its definition of who's considered fully vaccinated.
The update comes the same day Manitoba passed another vaccine milestone: as of Wednesday, more than two million doses had been administered across the province.
Reimer said COVID-19 immunizations have proven to be "incredibly effective" in Manitoba, where the number of outbreaks in care homes and intensive care unit admissions dropped as more people got their shots.
WATCH | Dr. Joss Reimer on vaccine effectiveness:
"This has been a monumental effort," she said.
"But we're not done yet."
More Manitobans eligible
The province also opened eligibility for another dose to the roughly 6,800 Manitobans who got a full course of a viral vector vaccine: either two shots of the one from AstraZeneca or the single-shot one from Johnson & Johnson.
Most of the people in that group got two shots of AstraZeneca, but about 450 submitted proof they got the Johnson & Johnson shot elsewhere, Reimer said. The one-dose vaccine was never administered in Manitoba.
Data shows the protection offered by those vaccines diminishes more quickly than that provided by mRNA shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, Reimer said.
Both newly eligible groups — health-care workers and people who only got viral vector vaccines — can get their third dose of an mRNA shot without a prescription anywhere that does COVID-19 immunizations, as long as six months have passed since their most recent shot, Reimer said.
Eligible health-care staff can also get their third shot at an available occupational health clinic.
But the update doesn't mean anyone has to rush out and get their booster shots as soon as possible, like many did for their first and second doses, Reimer said.
"This is not urgent the way dose one and dose two were. People who have had two doses have protection. We have seen that some people have lower levels over time, but most people are still well-protected," she said.
"So we're not saying that health-care workers or people who have received two doses of AstraZeneca should drop everything and get their dose tomorrow. This is really something that people can do over the next [few] weeks, as they get further and further away from their second dose."
She said the province is also looking at potentially expanding booster shots to older Manitobans who don't live in personal care homes and people in other congregate living settings.
It's likely everyone in the province will be offered the chance to get a third vaccine dose by the end of 2021, she said.
Reimer's update Wednesday comes one day after new restrictions, largely targeting those who are eligible for the vaccine but have yet to receive it, came into effect.
As of Wednesday, 85.3 per cent of eligible Manitobans had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 81.3 per cent had both shots.
WATCH | Full news conference on COVID-19 | October 6, 2021:
