Why Can ’t I Get A COVID-19 Booster Shot If I’ve Been Vaccinated With Moderna or J & J?

There’s been quite a bit of news about COVID-19 booster shots lately, and it’s been more confusing than reassuring. Public health officials don’t agree on whether everyone needs a booster yet, and in the same way that the vaccines were rolled out to different groups of people one category at a time as government agencies reviewed studies to make sure they were safe and effective, boosters are being doled out to certain people first. Here’s where we stand for now. If the vaccines work, why do I need a booster? The three vaccines that are currently available in the U.S.—from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson&Johnson-Janssen—are still highly effective in protecting you from getting COVID-19 disease. They are slightly less effective in protecting you from getting infected with the virus in the first place, but people who are vaccinated still have a five times lower rate of infection with SARS-CoV-2 than people who aren’t vaccinated, and a more than 10-fold rate of hospitalizations and deaths from the Delta variant of the virus. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Several months after getting the vaccine, the level of antibodies against the COVID-19 virus starts to wane, so public health officials feel that it makes sense to boost those numbers back up with another dose of the shot. There is some evidence that with each additional shot, the body starts making higher quality antibodies that are better at recognizing and bloc...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news