The Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) has sent a letter to the Health Services Director General requesting him to consider the possibility of offering a booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine (third dose) to all categories of health staff and frontline workers, GMOA sources said. According to the sources, the GMOA had called upon the Health Services Director General to refer the issue to the technical committees at national level and explore the possibility of arranging a booster dose of the vaccine to all categories of health staff and other frontline workers who are at high risk of contracting Covid-19 during their official duties.
The request had been made considering the rapid increase of Covid-19 positive cases all over the country during the recent past and the significant number of health staff including doctors who have been detected Covid-19 positive in the past few days. Most of them have been vaccinated with two doses of the Covishield vaccine against Covid-19, they said.
When analysing the global trend, the GMOA letter stated that certain countries have arrived at a policy decision to inject a booster dose of the vaccine to frontline workers including health staff, especially to protect them against the new Covid-19 variants which are of grave global concern, they said.