Syracuse, N.Y. – Even as millions of Americans are still hiking up shirtsleeves for their first Covid-19 vaccines, plans are underway for the next round.
Many public health experts believe that we’ll need booster shots, although they’re not sure when. It could be as early as this fall.
“I think the consensus is that we’re probably going to need boosters at some point,” said Dr. Tom Russo, chief of infectious disease at University of Buffalo’s medical school. “There’s probably going to be a waning of the vaccines. It remains uncertain when that waning immune response is going to occur and how much front-loaded time we want to get the booster.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has killed at least 600,000 Americans. Officials say the rapidly dropping death toll now is attributable largely to widespread vaccinations. More than 134 million Americans – about 40% of the population – are fully vaccinated.
The nation’s top infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told Congress that Americans should be ready for booster shots.
“I don’t anticipate that the durability of the vaccine protection is going to be infinite -- it’s just not,” Fauci told the Senate Appropriations Committee last week. “I imagine we will need, at some time, a booster. What we’re figuring out right now is what that interval is going to be.”
There are two major reasons we’re likely to need more shots, Russo said:
-- With most vaccines, the body’s immune response weakens over time. Some vaccines can last a lifetime – measles, for example – and others can last for a decade, like tetanus.
-- Like many viruses, the coronavirus is mutating, creating variants that the vaccines might not be as effective in stopping. Flu viruses mutate rapidly, which is why we need a flu shot every year. The rapid spread of the virus across the world gives the virus more chances to mutate and spread; the virus that caused India’s death toll to skyrocket has now been detected in Oregon.
So far, the vaccines in the U.S. have proven to be highly effective. They’ve been administered widely only since December, so we only have six months of data to go on. What we know about immunity in those millions of people, and in the thousands who participated in clinical trials starting last summer, suggests that immunity could last a year.
“We’re working just on supposition, not actual data, because the vaccines are too new to have the data” for a year, said Dr. Helen Jacoby, who retired last week as director of infectious disease at St. Joseph’s Health. “The people who first received the vaccines in clinical trial had good antibody response and were not coming down in significant numbers with symptomatic Covid.”
Jacoby was one of those participants, getting her first shots of Pfizer in late summer. Like all participants, she gave blood samples at six months after the shots and will give another sample this summer.
Those samples from the tens of thousands of trial participants will be examined for antibodies, and the results could give a clearer picture of how strong immunity remains one year after the shots. That data will help the Food and Drug Administration decide whether to approve booster shots, said Dr. Stephen Thomas, chief of infectious disease at Upstate Medical University.
“Hopefully the efficacy of your initial vaccine series gives us enough time – six or nine or 12 or whatever months -- to answer these other questions so that in the meantime there isn’t a big gap of unprotection,” Thomas said.
Even if boosters are needed, it’s not clear when we’ll have to line up again for shots. Russo said that it will take a while to ramp up production and get people into clinics again. You want to give the immune system a boost long before immunity wanes substantially, he said.
One possible scenario: The Covid-19 boosters will be given along with flu shots, when flu season starts in the fall.
“It could be packaged with the flu vaccine if the timing works out,” Russo said. “You could get a two-for-one in respiratory virus season.”
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The Link LonkJune 01, 2021 at 07:01PM
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Will we need Covid vaccine booster shots? If so, how soon? - syracuse.com
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