The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccination in the United States is well underway. Millions of people have already been vaccinated, and states are beginning to expand eligibility widely.
While experts hope we will achieve herd immunity by fall if vaccinations continue at our current rate, there are questions about the need for booster shots and how long our current immunizations will last. According to health experts, this largely depends on a number of factors: how long the vaccines guarantee immunity to infection and whether emerging variants reduce the vaccine’s effectiveness.
Boosters aren’t a reality yet, but they could be on the way.
At this point, the conversation about the need for booster shots for COVID-19 is still somewhat hypothetical, although vaccine manufacturers and researchers already are. Preparing for the ability to test boosters and vaccines adapted to known coronavirus variants.
“Right now, the most important thing at the moment is to get people vaccinated,” he said Waleed Javaid, director of infection prevention and control at Mount Sinai Downtown Network in Manhattan.
Javaid explained that the sooner we get the population vaccinated, the fewer chances the virus has to circulate and mutate. Mutations lead to more contagious variants, which could potentially require an updated vaccination.
The current COVID-19 variants – such as the B.1.1.7 variant discovered in Great Britain, the P.1 variant found in Brazil and the B.1.351 strain discovered in South Africa – are more transferable and can lead to one fourth wave of cases.
However, so far the vaccines have shown some efficacy against the variants. The shots may not be that strong against the current new strains, but they are in no way useless.
“We have not seen any variant that completely avoided vaccination,” said Javaid.
Experts usually define vaccine efficacy as preventing serious infection, hospitalization, and death. While mild infections can occur after vaccination, this is not the main cause for concern. Jennifer Lighter, an infectious disease specialist and hospital epidemiologist at New York University Langone Health, compared the symptoms to a cold or mild flu. “All vaccines prevent hospitalization and death: that’s it,” said Lighter.
Scientists are still measuring how long current COVID-19 vaccines provide immunity.
We also do not yet know how long the vaccines guarantee immunity against the coronavirus. For example, TD shots (tetanus and diphtheria) require a booster every 10 years. If we start to see new cases of COVID-19 popping up in the population between six months and five years from now, that would be a good reason for a booster, Javaid said.
We currently use antibody testing as a marker of an immune response. But we need more time to study the response of the population to the vaccines before we can adequately estimate the duration of immunity.
Making a booster shot, if and when we need it, doesn’t take as long as the original vaccines.
With the recordings from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, vaccine manufacturers can update existing vaccines to address new strains. Typically this method takes about three months. Both companies are already there to test a booster shot and working on a recording that focuses on COVID-19 mutations, but has not committed to when and if they will be needed by the public.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses an adenovirus – part of the common cold – to send a message to body cells and trigger an immune response against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. J & J’s vaccine studies took place when some of the new variants were circulating, so experts aren’t concerned about its efficacy when it comes to hospitalization or death. The company’s CEO told CNBC in early March that it is working on software that will address the new and emerging variants if needed, but he didn’t provide many other details on what that software might be.
COVID-19 probably won’t go away completely.
While there has been some vaccine response to known COVID-19 variants so far, Lighter noted that the virus is likely to continue to mutate.
“COVID-19 is not going away,” she said. In the long run, it will feel like the flu. The flu mutates every year, we have to get a vaccine every year, but it’s completely manageable because there are treatments and vaccines and people have immunity. ”
At this point, we don’t know if and when we need vaccine modifications, in the form of boosters, to address ongoing variants. But given that we will continue to see new mutations, it is likely that scientists will eventually have to take updated images to protect against subsequent virus strains. Whether that will be after six months, a year or five years is the question.
Experts are still learning about COVID-19. The information in this story is what was known or available at the time of publication, but guidelines may change as scientists discover more about the virus. Consult the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the most recent recommendations.