All You Should Know About COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Shot

A booster vaccine is planned to be a prompt to your immune system. Right now we're in a situation where we can see that over time, and it does take a long time, six to eight months or more, immunity that people achieve from the COVID vaccine gone in wane. The good news is that it is waning mostly against mild infection and we still do have protection from those early vaccines against severe infection. But we want to stop spread and we want to keep people from getting any form of infection. This is the reason why boosters are going to be recommended for everyone. First vaccination was envisioned to build an early immune system.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Assume it as if you are painting your house. You sometimes can get good coverage with one coat of paint, sometimes, occasionally, you might need three coats of paint to get that good coverage. So it is the same way with vaccines, some people might have a great response to one dose, most people need two doses of the mRNA vaccines to get a great response. But what we have erudite is that some people essentially need a third dose to get a better response to that initial vaccine and those are the people who’s immune system is weak. So their immune systems are not working well enough and they do need extra doses of vaccine to respond.

mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine

With the passage of time, once you have achieved that initial response, your immunity may still wane and you could need a booster. Just like as you might need an additional coat of paint, down the road, when the initial one starts to wear thin or get stains on it. Giving one more coat of paint is like giving a booster to the people. Scientists are giving that third dose and planning to give that booster dose with the same formulation of the original vaccine.

This may revolutionized over time. The manufacturers are studying variants of that initial mRNA vaccine that can be designed to cover mutations that some of the variants of concern are exhibiting. So it may be that we get annual boosters and over time each year, that might be a different actual vaccine that helps to provide better protection against the Corona Virus strains that are currently circulating, much like we do with flu vaccine. We already have this concept, we get a new flu vaccine every year, it covers different strains than previous years. So booster just means that your immune system will start to lose immunity over time doesn't mean that the initial vaccine didn't work and in fact, the immune response that we typically see in healthy people from the mRNA vaccines looks like it far exceeds what you really need in order to protect you and we don't have a perfect lab test that will show us just how immune you are. But researchers do look at something called neutralizing antibodies that do seem to correlate fairly well with protection against infection response and then over time, those antibodies start to wane and it takes a while before it wanes to a point that's actually important because there is this extra, additional robust immune response of over and above what we actually need and so that can wane for months and months before we become vulnerable.

Again, so far, it looks like this side effect profile from a third dose is very similar to what was experienced with a second dose. Not any worse, perhaps a little milder, and that probably has to do with the time that's elapsed since you last had that vaccine. So getting that initial series, you are taking a vaccine three or four weeks after you just had it and your immune system is really replying strongly. But after months later, with a booster dose, it doesn't look like there is any more robust immune symptoms that people would have. But they can presume to have those distinctive vaccine side-effects. So they can have a headache, they could feel tired, they could have a low-get grade fever, they could have some muscle pains and those still happen really rapidly and resolve on their own within two to three days.

COVID-19 Delta Variant

We are observing some declining of immunity against the Delta variant, we still do find that the vaccines are serving a lot to avoid severe disease and being hospitalized even after many months. But we can see it clearly that the Delta variant has some confrontation to that vaccination and we want to stop it spread. So boosting people now means that we can reduce those milder infections and those asymptomatic infections that contribute to spread and remember when this virus is spreading in our community, even if it is not causing symptoms, it has the chance to mutate and those mutations can randomly lead to the growth of a new variant. So we need to do everything we can now to stop it.