XXVII Meeting of PAHO's Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Vaccine-Preventable Diseases: Tailoring the SAGE Roadmap to the Requirements of the Americas and the Strategic Use of COVID-19 Booster Doses, 27 January 2022 (virtual)

Abstract

The WHO SAGE Roadmap for prioritizing use of COVID-19 vaccines was updated on 21 January 2022. The latest iteration builds on WHO’s Strategy to achieve global COVID-19 vaccination by mid-2022. Since the start of the COVID-19 vaccine introduction process, countries of the Americas have followed the technical recommendations of the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on immunization to implement their vaccination prioritization strategies. The emergence of the Omicron variant and the corresponding explosive increase in COVID-19 cases, coupled with a massive expansion of vaccine availability across the world, led almost all countries in the Americas to take individual decisions on expanding vaccine eligibility to children and adolescents and to introduce booster doses of the COVID-19 vaccines. PAHO’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Vaccine-Preventable Diseases convened on 27 January 2022 to discuss how to tailor updated SAGE Roadmap to the context of the Americas. Considering the available evidence, the members endorsed the updated WHO-SAGE Roadmap, and provided additional recommendations to guide the further use of COVID-19 booster doses in the Americas, so that priority groups receive them first. Finally, the TAG urged Member States to invest in improving the infrastructure and capacity of the national immunization programs both for routine vaccination and COVID-19 vaccination roll-out.