People over the age of 65 should receive a second booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, the National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC) has recommended.

This will be the fourth vaccine dose this cohort will have received during the pandemic.

NIAC has also recommended that those aged 12 years and older who are immunocompromised should receive a second booster. Meanwhile, those aged between five and 11 years who are immunocompromised should complete an extended primary course, which is a total of three vaccine doses for this cohort.

The Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, has accepted the new recommendations and the Department of Health and HSE are now working to operationalise them.

“Vaccines have achieved extraordinary success in preventing severe disease, hospitalisation and death and they continue to have a very good safety profile with hundreds of millions of doses administrated globally.

“Those who are unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated continue to be disproportionality affected and account for approximately a third of hospitalisations for Covid-19,” Minister Donnelly said.

He added that he has asked NIAC to continue to “actively examine the evidence” around administering a second booster to other groups.

NIAC continues to recommend that people get fully vaccinated if they have not already done so, irrespective of their history of a previous Covid infection.