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A health worker prepares a dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in a rural town in New Mexico. (Reuters/Yonhap News)

Setbacks for global COVID-19 supplies are being predicted as the US focuses more heavily on policies focused on its own population, including the administration of third booster doses and controls on exports of raw materials.

The headaches for South Korea’s disease control and vaccine supply efforts have been compounded by the discovery of infections with a double mutant variant of the virus originating in India.

The US vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna announced plans to supply vaccines for a third dose to boost the immunity of Americans who have received their second dose.

“A likely scenario is that there will be likely a need for a third dose, somewhere between six and 12 months,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a Friday appearance on CNBC.

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel also said the same day that his company plans to begin supplying the US this fall with vaccines for a third dose.

Andy Slavitt, senior advisor to the Joseph Biden administration’s vaccine response team, said, “Requiring additional shots in the future is obviously a foreseeable potential event.”

The Economist also reported that India and other countries are threatened with a halt to vaccine production due to US controls on exports of vaccine raw materials and related equipment.

CEO Adar Poonawalla of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest producer of vaccines, tweeted a message calling on Biden to “lift the embargo of raw material exports out of the US.”

The company is currently producing 160 million doses of AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines per month — but there are concerns about production setbacks in the next four to six weeks if the US does not supply 37 associated items.

Meanwhile, social strategy team director Son Young-rae from South Korea’s Central Disaster Management Headquarters reported Sunday that two patients in March and seven patients in April had been diagnosed with a “double mutant” virus variant originating in India.

The South Korean government explained that there had been no cases of the variant being spread domestically.

By Shin Gi-sub, senior staff writer

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