Will You Need a Booster Shot of the COVID-19 Vaccine?

When the first COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December 2020, most people breathed a sigh of relief since both shots were shown to be between 94% and 95% effective in protecting from COVID-19 symptoms. But public health experts warned that nobody really knew how long the protection would last, since the longest clinical trials in people only went to a few months. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, suggested that additional booster doses—and perhaps even yearly shots, similar to the annual flu shot—might be necessary to keep the public safe. That’s because SARS-CoV-2, like many other viruses we know about—from influenza to HIV—doesn’t sit still. It constantly mutates, and a handful of these mutations are now circulating around the world and keeping public health experts on the alert, since these variant viruses are better at evading immune cells, including those elicited by the vaccines. So far, experts say that the vaccines continue to provide good protection against all forms of SARS-CoV-2. But the immune response against some of the variants, specifically against one called B.1.351 that was first identified in South Africa, may be slightly lower than immune responses against the original strain that the vaccines were designed to fight. An additio...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news