• “The two doses, they’re not enough for omicron,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said.
• Bourla said the two-dose vaccine does not provide robust protection against infection and its ability to prevent hospitalization has also declined.
• He said third shots are providing good protection against death, and “decent” protection against hospitalization.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla on Monday (1/10/22) said two doses of the company’s vaccine may not provide strong protection against infection from the Covid omicron variant, and the original shots have also lost some of their efficacy at preventing hospitalization.

Bourla, in an interview at JPMorgan’s health-care conference, emphasized the importance of a third shot to boost people’s protection against omicron.

“The two doses, they’re not enough for omicron,” Bourla said. “The third dose of the current vaccine is providing quite good protection against deaths, and decent protection against hospitalizations.”

Bourla said omicron is a more difficult target than previous variants. Omicron, which has dozens of mutations, can evade some of the protection provided by Pfizer’s original two shots.

“We have seen with a second dose very clearly that the first thing that we lost was the protection against infections,” Bourla said. “But then two months later, what used to be very strong in hospitalization also went down. And I think this is what everybody’s worried about.”