The implementation of COVID-19 vaccination is well advanced in the United States. Millions of people have already been vaccinated, and states are beginning to expand eligibility widely.
While experts expect that we will achieve herd immunity in the fall if vaccines continue at our current pace, there are questions about the need to make booster vaccines and how long our current vaccines will last. According to health experts, this largely depends on a couple of factors: how long vaccines guarantee immunity to infection and whether emerging variants reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Drivers aren’t a reality yet, but they may be on the road.
At this point, the conversation about the need for booster injections for COVID-19 is still slightly hypothetical, although vaccine manufacturers and researchers are already. preparing for the possibility of testing booster and vaccines by adjusting known coronavirus variants.
“Right now, the most important thing right now is to vaccinate people,” he said Waleed Javaid, director of infection prevention and control at Mount Sinai Downtown Network in Manhattan.
Javaid explained that the faster we vaccinate the population, the less chance the virus has of circulating and mutating. Mutations are those that lead to more contagious variants, which may require an updated vaccine.
Current variants of COVID-19, such as variant B.1.1.7 discovered in Great Britain, variant P.1 found in Brazil and the B.1.351 strain discovered in South Africa – are more transmissible and can lead to fourth wave of cases.
However, so far vaccines have proven to be somewhat effective against variants. The shots may not be as strong against the current new strains, but they are not useless.
“We haven’t seen any variant completely evade vaccination,” Javaid said.
Experts primarily define the effectiveness of the vaccine as the prevention of serious infections, hospitalization, and death. Although mild infections can occur after vaccination, this is not the main cause for alarm. Jennifer Lighter, an infectious disease specialist and hospital epidemiologist at New York University, Langone Health, compared the symptoms to a common cold or mild flu. “All vaccines prevent hospitalization and death: that’s the conclusion,” Lighter said.
Scientists continue to measure how long current COVID-19 vaccines offer immunity.
Nor do we know how long they guarantee immunity to coronavirus. TD (tetanus and diphtheria) intakes, for example, require reinforcement every 10 years. If we start to see new cases of COVID-19 emerge in the population within six months to five years, then it would be a good reason for a boost, Javaid said.
Right now we use antibody testing as a marker of an immune response. But we need more time to study the population’s response to vaccines before we can sufficiently assess the duration of immunity.
Making a booster shot, if and when we need it, will not take as long as the original vaccines.
With the shots of Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, vaccine manufacturers can upgrade existing vaccines to deal with new strains. Usually that process it takes about three months. Both companies are already tests a reinforcement feature and working on a feature aimed at COVID-19 mutations, but which have not been committed to when or 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 the body’s cells and trigger an immune response against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. J&J vaccine trials occurred when some of the new variants were circulating, so experts are not concerned about their effectiveness when it comes to hospitalization or death. The company’s CEO told CNBC in early March that he was working on software that would address new and emerging variants if needed, but did not offer many other details about what that software could be.
COVID-19 will probably not disappear completely.
Although to date there has been some vaccine response against known variants of COVID-19, Lighter noted that the virus is likely to continue to mutate.
“COVID-19 will not leave,” he said. “If it looks long-term, it will feel like the flu. The flu changes every year, we have to have a vaccine every year, but it is totally manageable because there are treatments and vaccines and people have immunity ”.
At this time, we do not know if or exactly when we will need adjustments to the vaccine, in the form of enhancers, to guide us into the ongoing variants. But given the fact that we will continue to see new mutations, scientists are likely to end up needing to create up-to-date shots to provide protection against later virus strains. The question is whether it takes six months, a year or five years.
Experts are still learning about COVID-19. The information in this story is what was known or available from the publication, but orientations may change as scientists find out more about the virus. Consult your disease control and prevention centers for the most up-to-date recommendations.