People under the age of 50 may have a chance to get a second booster shot in the summer depending on the decision of federal health officials. People 50 and older have been eligible for the shots since March.
Image by Paul Hennessy / SOPA / LightRocket via Getty Images
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Image by Paul Hennessy / SOPA / LightRocket via Getty Images
People under the age of 50 may have a chance to get a second booster shot in the summer depending on the decision of federal health officials. People 50 and older have been eligible for the shots since March.
Image by Paul Hennessy / SOPA / LightRocket via Getty Images
The Biden administration is trying to decide whether to make a second COVID-19 booster more widely available to protect more people from the latest spike in infections and hospitalizations this summer. are not.
Anyone age 50 or older – and anyone 12 or older with a weakened immune system – is eligible for a second booster shot from March. But most people under 50 can’t get it. That could now change. NPR is aware that federal officials are currently debating the move.
Advocates of expanding eligibility for booster shots say the country urgently needs to ramp up as many people as possible because of the threat posed by the most contagious version of the emerging coronavirus, which is called BA.5.
Skeptics doubt that another booster dose of the same vaccine will provide more protection for most people. Some also worry another shot could backfire, by training the immune system to only fight the original strain of the virus. There is also concern that receiving another booster now could hinder efforts to launch the next generation of boosters targeting omicrons by the fall. For most people under 50, the protection they got from the first three shots is gone. In reality, a new study released on Tuesday showed that the antibody response fades significantly within three months. So, with infections on the rise again amid widespread spread of the BA.5 variant, federal officials debated whether to expand eligibility to offer multiple protections. more people during the summer or not.
“What else can we do to reduce the likelihood of serious illness?” ask Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota epidemiologist who has urged federal officials to relax enhanced eligibility. “I think, Boosters is the obvious answer.”
Several other infectious disease experts agree.
“There’s a lot of COVID around almost at any time. People aren’t as careful as they used to be. We know that immunity declines over time. We have a variant that has the ability to evade the system. We have strong evidence that Dr. Robert Wachter at the University of California, San Francisco says Wachter thinks the government should give all adults a second booster. Others think Fortifiers should only be given to people at high risk, Dr. said: “I don’t think it’s going to happen to a perfectly healthy 25-year-old who needs to be getting a health boost right now. mean. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the White House. “There’s a difference between a perfectly healthy 25-year-old and a 43-year-old with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”
But other infectious disease experts say there’s really no solid evidence that getting a second booster gives much protection to most otherwise healthy people. And, they argue, three injections are still protecting most people from serious illness and death.
“The goal of this vaccine is to protect against serious diseases. If we were to try to protect again a mild disease for many years, we would give a booster a few times a year and that doesn’t make sense.” what it means to the public’s view of health,” said Dr. Paul Offithead of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
And there is concern that if people get the same shot too many times, it could backfire – by training their immune systems to only try to fight the original strain instead of protecting against the new variants. . While this is still a theoretical risk, some say the evidence that it could be real is growing.
“There’s this imprinting phenomenon also known as parent antigenic sin, where if you keep getting the same doses of the vaccine, you can in a sense trap the immune system wanting to react to the virus. withdrawn and not adapted to future variations”. said Dr. Celine Gounderan infectious disease specialist and colleague of Kaiser Health News.
A final concern regarding the public message: Giving people another booster shot right now could confuse things in the fall when the government plans to roll out the next generation of vaccines. next. It will likely be a bivalent vaccine, meaning that it has been updated to target omicrons along with the original strain of the virus. The idea is to try to protect people against what could be another bad winter.
And if people get boosters now, in midsummer, there may not be enough time between injections – as people may have to wait months between boosters for them to work. (There is disagreement on this and there is no good evidence for what the optimal interval is.) “The distance between the boosters is important,” says John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medicine. “One reason is that the response to the vaccine dose is impaired when the level of antibodies in the blood is too high.”
Some also argue that the country should focus its immunization outreach efforts on attracting more people to the first shot and the first booster. One-third of adults are still unvaccinated and only half of those who have been vaccinated have received their first booster.
