As school back to in-person, international students double up on the COVID-19 vaccine at UC Berkeley 

When Xueer Lu received her second dose of Sinopharm's COVID-19 vaccine in China earlier this year, she didn't know she would have to get vaccinated again with a different vaccine.

That’s because Lu was moving to the U.S. to attend graduate school at UC Berkeley and the WHO had not yet approved Sinopharm WIBP-Corv (Wuhan Institute of Biological Products) vaccine for emergency use. 
“Now I have to rush for a full course of Pfizer,” Lu said.  

Lu is among the international students in the U.S. who have double vaccination or plan to do so. Their motivations range from concerns that the vaccines they got in their home country are less effective to emerging variants and to meet school requirements. 

As UC Berkeley returned to in-person learning this year, the university required vaccines for all employees and students taking in-person classes or who need to come to campus for any reason. Unvaccinated students had to submit an approved exemption by Oct. 1 or they could not register for in-person classes. However, the school offers flexibility to international students who don't get vaccines, allowing them to isolate for a week upon arrival and get tested weekly until they are fully vaccinated.   

"UC campuses have a very large number of international students coming from all around the world. And so the question was, what to do with students who come and have had a vaccine approved by WHO but not by FDA," said Dr. Arthur Reingold, Chair of California State COVID-19 Vaccine Workgroup. "University of California system at that time decided that if someone was fully vaccinated with one of the WHO-approved vaccines, we would accept that."

Graduate student Advait Lad from India was one of the few taking weekly tests instead of revaccination, waiting for Covaxin to get approved by WHO. However, the WHO kept delaying approval for Covaxin. Lad therefore had to change his plan.

“I got Pfizer on October 26 because I can’t miss registering for classes,” said Lad. “When I landed in the U.S., there were rumors that Covaxin was supposed to get approved by September. As they kept postponing it, I was no longer sure it’s going to happen.”

Although Covaxin has been granted emergency using authorization on November 3,   UC Berkeley hasn’t listed it on the website as an approved vaccine for students.

Meanwhile, some international students who were concerned about the effectiveness of inactivated vaccines, decided to get revaccinated.

Weijie Rong, a visiting scholar from Taiwan, got Pfizer vaccines three months after receiving two doses of Sinopharm BBIBP-CorV in May. 

"I read an article saying that the efficacy of Chinese inactivated vaccines is just over 50% while those (that) get approved in the U.S. are known to be 90% effective," said Rong. "That's why I don't trust (that) my Sinopharm vaccine will protect me from the COVID-19 and its variants."

Although all seven of the WHO emergency use listed vaccines provide protection against developing severe disease, hospitalization and death due to the Delta variant, Dr. Reingold said the school is constantly “reviewing the vaccination policy as things evolve.

"The strong preference in the recommendation for international students is that they receive at least one additional dose of an FDA-approved mRNA vaccine, which we have available stock and are happy to give those individuals a higher level of protection," said Dr. Reingold. "And it could become the policy."

University of California, Berkeley is not the only school considering pushing extra doses of FDA-approved vaccines among international students. John Hopkins University announced on August 19 that it will only accept FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines, including the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, which mandates that all the international students get revaccinated.

"Just because the vaccine is not approved, doesn't mean it's not effective. It's just that many organizations like universities want an easy solution," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, having a different perspective on the current vaccination policy. 

"I think it is important to have a standard way of talking about these vaccines and for organizations to evaluate them," said Dr. Adalja. "There's enough Information that WHO emergency listing should be taken as fully vaccinated. I don't think we want to be the revaccinating people for no reason when there are so many people around the world who haven't even gotten their first doses of vaccines."